7 Keys Strategy for Spotify
In february 2019, I had 2K people listening to my music on Spotify. Each month before, I had like 4K streams on that platform. It was growing but very slowly. Today, I have about 50k streams per month & 10K listeners (and the same goes with Deezer and Apple Music). This is not a lot yet, but I intend to make these numbers grow !
Here is some key Spotify statistics:
191 million monthly active Spotify users
87 million of these are Spotify Premium subscribers
Spotify’s can lay claim to 36% of the global streaming market
Average users listen to 41 unique artists per week
Average hours spent listening to Spotify per month stands at 25 hours
44% of users listen to Spotify on a daily basis
40 million tracks available on Spotify
Around a third of Spotify listening time is spent on Spotify-generated playlists, with another third going on user-generated playlists
“Today’s Top Hits” playlist is followed by nearly 20 million people
Other influential playlists include “RapCaviar” with over 10 million followers and “¡Viva Latino!” with 9 million followers
One Spotify stream is worth about $0.004 to an artist
To win a game, you need to understand its system. Watching these numbers, it’s clear that I have to enter “playlists” created by Spotify users and Spotify itself to be heard. I’m no more focused on radios because they never play an independent artist. Payola is still leading that old media, and I don’t want to seduce stupid Radio hosts in order to have my music on air. I know they will play me if I get bigger online.
Spotify offers something incredible : to be featured on any playlists and to be a “suggested” song even if you’re no one, just a singer who uses Landr or Tunecore to put it on Deezer, Apple Music and Spotify.
So here is my 7 key strategies :
1-I try to get duets with famous singers, even if they were famous in the 90’s cause they still have thousand/millions of people streaming their classic songs. And bingo, I started with Bobby Valentino. This way, I’m featured on his profile and he has more than 1 million “streamers” each month. More duets : Luke James, Pleasure P, 112, Ray J and more…How do I do ? At first I contact their beatmakers, then if they like my music, they’re ok to deal.
2-I release a song every friday so the Spotify algorithm knows that I’m an “active” user, like on any social media.
3-I send each new song to the Spotify Playlist Consideration. You have to do it 10 to 15 days before it’s released. I had the chance to have a song featured on the “Release Radar”, it brought me 10K plays in one month. Here is the song featuring rapper Young Dro. I also have one song in the famous Friday Release Portugal, 2 in the “Dancing Kizomba Playlist” and I’m the only singer there not signed to a major label.
4-I create playlists by genre naming them “Reggaeton 2019” or “Kizomba 2019”. That’s SMO (Social Media Optimization): content linked to keywords that people are searching for…I add my own songs there. It brings me streams. I have to promote them on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook via ads.
5-I make covers of famous songs, but my style. I have people listening to my covers of Craig David, Booba and Cookie Dingler. Of course, I only do the covers I really feel. These covers have chances to enter the official playlists by genre, for example if I do a bossa nova version of a rap song.
6-I produce others artists: I provide the beats, mixing, distribution so I get paid for that if there are streams. I have 2 spanish singers so far.
7-I have to contact the owners of Spotify playlists (users) who get the most streams in order to be featured there. But most of the time, they ask for money. Payola is not dead !
My goal is to reach 500k streams each month to get 2000 dollars revenues (a stream is 0,004dollars) each month. Ambition yes lol ! But if you have good songs and a great strategy, it’s only a question of time…
And don’t forget, you need to do the same in Deezer and Apple Music.
