How to promote your music effectively on Spotify: Our advice

Today, Spotify has more than 422 million monthly users, including 182 million premium users who regularly listen to music on the application. In other words, Spotify is now one of the most popular platforms for listening to music. By extension, it’s also one of the best platforms on which to promote your music in 2022.

But with so many listeners and so much competition, how do you make your mark on the music platform? Will this really get your career off the ground? Is it within everyone’s reach?

The Red Label Agency team reveals its top tips for promoting your music on Spotify

Set up your Spotify for Artists profile to promote your music effectively

Spotify for Artists is a free tool that lets you control your artist profile on Spotify and communicate directly with your fans. You can also use the tool to track the engagement of your fans and discover new listeners. To promote your music effectively on Spotify, it’s important to set up your Spotify for Artists profile correctly. Follow our advice to get the most out of your profile and boost the visibility of your music!

Make sure all the essential information about you is filled in on your Spotify for Artists profile. Your profile photo must be up to date and representative of your artistic image. Similarly, consider adding a cover photo to your profile to give a visual overview of your musical world.

Take the time to write a short biography outlining your musical background and influences. This biography will be read by some of your fans and it is important that it is both professional and attractive. You can propose 2-3 paragraphs, in English if you are targeting international markets, which will allow you to highlight your latest releases, for example. This means that you regularly update your bio to reflect your latest releases.

Once you have filled in all the essential information on your profile, move on to promoting your titles. Spotify for Artists allows you to choose an Artist’s pick from your profile. It’s the perfect opportunity to showcase a new single or a key track from your latest album.

A more discreet feature of the tool, you can publish stories and posts aimed at your fans. Stories are temporary visual content that you can share on your profile to announce a concert or present a new track. Posts are intended for longer distribution and can be used to share photos, videos or links to relevant articles.

The whole point of having a Spotify for Artists account is to have access to your available statistics to track the engagement of your fans and discover new listeners.

In particular, you can see how many times each track has been played, which countries have listened to your music the most, etc.

This information is very useful for targeting your promotional actions and reaching your fans effectively, but also for seeing if one of your titles is a flop or, on the contrary, a huge hit.

In a nutshell:

Showcase photos representing your world (jpg or png format, 2660×1140 for the banner and 300×30 for the profile photo)
Optimise your biography and featured content according to your latest releases and what you really want to highlight
Don’t forget that you can also link your social networks and mobilise the “Merchbar” if you sell physical products.

In some cases, the artists we support don’t want to manage their Spotify account and upload their sounds. To enable them to concentrate fully on their productions and bring their creativity to bear, Red Label Agency also offers a service of uploading your publications and distributing your sounds on streaming platforms.

The essential levers for promoting your music on Spotify

There are now many ways for artists to gain exposure on Spotify. In practice, Spotify is a lever where you have little room for manoeuvre and few opportunities to get your sounds known, but they are nonetheless interesting to try out and put in place to get yourself known.

Propose good music

The prerequisite for being known and appreciated, and above all for winning new fans, is still to make good music. It’s a classic point, and one that may seem unnecessary to stress, but it’s really the basis of what will help you discover Spotify.

You’re competing with a huge number of other artists, and even if listeners discover your sounds through recommendations or by chance, it’s not certain that they’ll follow you.

They may not like your music, or they may even like it but not want to go any further or find out more about you. Producing good music, with good sound quality, that suits your target audience is the foundation on which you can build your reputation as an artist, singer, musician or band.

Creating playlists

Promoting your music on Spotify and other streaming platforms is a good way of getting your music discovered, even if a very large proportion of this audience won’t bother to find out more about your music.

There are a number of ways to ensure that you get discovered: pitching your sounds to get into Spotify’s algorithm, the stories we’ve already mentioned, but the most interesting thing is to sign up to playlists.

The playlist system is at the heart of today’s streaming music platforms and software. We strongly recommend that you create playlists around your sounds, particularly for your current and future audiences:

The best of your sounds, your recent releases and your best-performing music
A playlist of your collaborations, featuring your current sounds and possibly those of other artists you know in a similar musical style (but not necessarily).
Variable playlists, which have a global reach but are more complicated to promote. In practical terms, this means putting the best tracks on a given musical universe, and including some of your own tracks. But at this point, it’s a slightly more complicated strategy that won’t necessarily give you much visibility.

As you will have realised, creating your own Spotify playlists is necessary in order to keep your listeners indirectly informed and to showcase your sounds and collaborations to your fans, but it’s not necessarily what will make you known to a new community. However, collaborations with other artists are recommended, especially if they work in the same way, which will give you more exposure in their community.

Subscribe to playlists

The best way to gain visibility with a new audience is to get yourself listed on playlists that are already well established, or by labels that know how to do it.

There are different types of playlists:

editorial These are the top playlists highlighted by Spotify’s editorial team. In practical terms, if you’re visible in one of these playlists, you’ve mobilised the best way to be visible on Spotify. But you still need to succeed in getting yourself included in these playlists, as the competition for listings is pretty stiff. Make sure you register your music on different playlists beforehand so that your profile, and some of your sounds, are visible to Spotify’s algorithms. In the long term, this is a powerful indicator, because the more your music is played, the more it will be recognised as interesting by the staff. But it’s a long-term job, and one that pays off handsomely.
personalised editorial The difference here is at the algorithmic level. The music featured is determined partly by the editorial team and partly by the algorithm. It’s also a good way of getting yourself known and appearing in playlists that interest Internet users, but here you have no room for manoeuvre and no leverage to promote your music.
algorithms This is the type of playlist that encourages you to attract your current fanbase as much as possible to Spotify. The more music you have saved or bookmarked on Spotify, the more the algorithm will identify it as high potential. This is how you will gradually reach a new audience, thanks to the algorithm that will promote your sounds to users who like the same style of music. This will allow your tracks to be highlighted in algorithmic playlists (“Designed for you”, “Your favourite mixes”, “Content you love”…).
brand owned in particular by record labels and other major music players. These labels tend to select songs and groups that are already well established in certain musical sectors, but they also aim to bring emerging groups and budding artists to the forefront to offer something new.

It can be complicated to get recognised by Spotify in order to be promoted to a new audience. However, you can take action to improve your chances of appearing. It’s not necessarily something that will make you more famous, since most listeners will simply listen to the music without going any further. On the other hand, it’s an excellent way of introducing people to your sounds. And even if only 5% of listeners start to follow you, that’s already a great step forward for your musical career.

As you can see, if you succeed in being visible in any of these types of playlist, you can continually improve your chances of appearing in algorithmic playlists. So it’s worth building a visibility strategy here to get yourself noticed by Spotify’s algorithm.

When it comes to brand labels, access is much more complicated if you don’t have the right contacts. At Red Label Agency, we work closely with labels and playlists that are well known on the platform. If you’re interested in integrating your music into popular playlists, take a look at our offers for Subscribe to Spotify playlists.

Use a spotify code

Another way of getting known via Spotify is to share your sounds on your other social networks. Getting your different networks to communicate with each other is a very powerful way of increasing your visibility.

To do this, there’s a Spotify feature that lets you place a QR code to link to your music on the streaming platform. Don’t hesitate to make use of this feature, as it not only warns and encourages your current fans to listen to your old and new releases, but also indirectly helps to get you detected by the algorithm and perhaps bring some of your listeners from other social networks to follow you on Spotify.

So, Spotify or not Spotify to promote your music?

In conclusion, Spotify is both a means of getting your music known and a tool for listening to it. If you’re active enough, if you regularly encourage your listeners to listen to your sounds and include them in their playlists, you increase your chances of creating a snowball effect in algorithmic playlists later on.

But promoting your music on Spotify is not enough in itself. In addition to these levers, there are other networks to mobilise:

– Influencer promotion: this involves asking music influencers (bloggers, youtubers, etc.) to talk about your music on their blogs or in their videos. – Influencer promotion: this involves asking music influencers (bloggers, youtubers, etc.) to talk about your music on their blogs or in their videos.

– Promotion on social networks: this is a highly effective lever, especially if you have a very specific target audience. Depending on your music and your audience, some social networks will be more effective than others. For example, if you have a young audience, Instagram will be more effective than Facebook.

– Entering competitions: there are many music competitions on the internet, particularly on Spotify. In general, this involves inviting Internet users to vote for their favourite song. This considerably increases your visibility and therefore your chances of being spotted by a label or record company.

– Radio broadcasting: this is a very effective way of getting the word out about your music, but the impact is less significant.

– You may also need to promote your music via paid-for channels, on Spotify or otherwise, but not all are created equal. Let’s take a closer look

Promote your sounds with advertising on Spotify

Spotify is one of the most important music platforms for listening to music, directly after Youtube.

If you have an advertising budget, it might be a good idea to invest in a few Spotify ads. Spotify ads are a great way of showcasing your music to a wider audience and getting them to click through to your artist page. There are different ways to target your Spotify advertising, so make sure you think carefully about who you want to reach before you spend your money. One way of doing this is through advertising:

Ad Studio: these are the adverts that listeners hear in the free version, inserted between two pieces of music. They may be interesting, but they’re only aimed at people who prefer the free version: maybe Spotify isn’t their preferred listening platform…
Marquee: these are sponsored recommendations that appear full-screen when your listeners open Spotify to encourage them to listen to your latest music. This is a good way of encouraging people to discover your new sound, but this type of advertising is primarily aimed at your existing audience.

In fact, advertising on Spotify is not the most interesting way of promoting your music on the streaming platform.

If you have an advertising budget, the best place to invest is on the platform where the majority of your target audience is to be found – YouTube.

YouTube Ads has a number of significant advantages:

On Spotify, users listen mainly to the sound and look very little at the visuals. This means that Internet users are not as available when they are listening to music on Spotify as when they are watching a video on YouTube: in the two cases, the attention paid to your advertising, and its impact, will not be the same.
In terms of user engagement, it’s less obvious to get people to discover you via Spotify ads because they’re unlikely to go to your networks or profile at first sight. On YouTube, the more visual platform means you have a better chance of attracting new interested parties.
YouTube Ads doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money, but the return on investment is often worthwhile. This involves targeting your target audience, i.e. the one most likely to appreciate your sounds, and promoting your sounds to this audience.

In either case, you can consult the various indicators to see what is working well and what is not.

We therefore advise you to try out both advertising approaches, but if you want to maximise your chances of growing your community of fans, we’ll set up your YouTube Ads campaigns manually, in complete transparency and leaving you in control.

FAQ - Promoting your music on Spotify

What kind of content can I create to promote my music on Spotify?

There are many ways to promote your music on Spotify. For example, you can create themed playlists, music playlists, podcasts or music videos. You can also share links to your music on social networks and other online forums. The key is to find the type of content that will work best with your target audience.

Are there any risks in promoting my music on Spotify?

There are no particular risks in promoting your music on Spotify. However, as with any form of promotion, there are a few things to bear in mind to avoid any problems. For example, always respect copyright and do not share content without the permission of the copyright holder.

This is important in the case of a collaboration that could go wrong with another artist. And don’t forget that aggressive promotion can put off some potential listeners. But in the case of promotion on Spotify, there aren’t many ways to promote aggressively, or else it’s not really up to you (highlighted by the algorithm).

Do you have any other tips for promoting my music on Spotify?

Yes ! In addition to the tips already mentioned, here are a few more to help you promote your music on Spotify:

– Update your profile and profile photo regularly;

– Include a link to your music in your bio;

– Share interesting and engaging content on your social networks to tease your latest releases, and place a QR code for your new music to redirect your audience to Spotify ;

– Create a themed playlist and share it with your friends and followers.

These other subjects may also be of interest to you