FAQ FOR SPOTIFY ORDERS

If your song is already out, your order start date will be the nearest Tuesday or Friday that is 3 business days out from your order.

If your song is an upcoming release (and was ordered at least 3 business days in advance), your song will be scheduled to start on your release date (as provided in your order form) or on the nearest Tuesday or Friday if your release is not on a Tuesday or Friday.

All orders are completed within 14-35 days of the order start date. (Expect larger sized orders to be on the longer side of this timeline.)

If you made a Spotify order, we will be in contact via email once we have heard back from all of the curators, so be on the lookout!

If you made a YouTube order, we do not touch base with you via email because these orders do not involve receiving curator feedback. You can access your YouTube results in the analytics section of your YouTube channel.

1. Share your music on social media in a relational way (story behind the song, do an Instagram/TikTok/Facebook/etc. live with cowriters/producer, etc.).
2. Optimize your Spotify profile with photos of you (not a graphic), social links (make sure you haven’t changed your handles since you put them in there last), and a bio. Also, make your song the artist pick, and add playlists you get on into your artist playlists section of your Spotify profile.

You can edit your Spotify profile through claiming your profile at Spotify For Artists: https://artists.spotify.com

Fill out this form and we’ll hit you back within 2-5 business days.

No worries! Please contact us here.

From there, we will start the song promotion once the song is live on the soonest Tuesday or Friday.

For the sake of avoiding this with your distributor in the future, release date delays typically happen because of one of the following reasons:

1. The song wasn’t uploaded to the artist’s digital distributor in time.
2. The song actually IS out, but is registered under another artist ID with the same name.
3. The digital distributor may have had a technical issue (note: This is very uncommon in our experience).

When listeners stream on Spotify via shuffle mode (this is the default and only option for the Spotify free tier on mobile), your song will play alongside a mix of other songs Spotify has deemed similar to your song and/or discography.

However, Spotify can sometimes suggest music that has no relation to your genre or style. This happens because of one of the following reasons:

1. You are a brand new artist with no accumulated data via Spotify.
2. You currently have a small listening audience with not enough data aggregated by Spotify to know similarities between your listener base’s tastes.
3. You have promoted previously with extremely broad targeting instead of specific targeting, which confuses the algorithm and results in seemingly random algorithmic suggestions.
4. You are pivoting from one genre to another with your discography, and Spotify is shuffling your music with the genre or style you are known for but doesn’t represent your current releases.

The best solution for this is to quickly promote via specific targeting, which is exactly what we do! Most artists with this problem see this solution completely resolved within 2-8 weeks of their song promotion, as long as they aren’t doing any broad promotion strategies elsewhere.

If you are not seeing many results yet, it’s likely one of these reasons (in order from most common to least common):

1. If your campaign is in progress, it’s highly likely we have either not heard yet from all of the curators, or that curators have just added your song to their playlist. It is highly rare to see explosive results overnight - playlists are more like “dripping faucets” that have little spurts of growth daily from people around the world.
2. The projections for our Spotify promos according to our Spotify promo into form (view here) are averages (not guarantees) and monthly listeners (not streams) at the peak of the results related to the campaign. Niche genres typically have a lower yield because there’s naturally a smaller audience for the specific sound.
3. Open Spotify For Artists on desktop (not mobile), and click your exact song to see the most accurate metrics in relation to your actual song instead of just the sum total.
   
   Your total listenership may be dropping in the midst of your Spotify campaign because listeners are moving onto new songs from your previous discography, or curators are removing old songs from playlists. This is really common for artists who have promoted songs in the past in a previous season, as curators rotate playlists to keep selection fresh, and listeners do the same with their personal listening playlists.
   
   The solution for this is to continually promote more music. While some listeners will leave, a select few will stay and hang for the long term. This is why huge 80s rock bands that filled stadiums in the 80s now fill arenas in their 70s - because a portion of the listeners from the previous era of “stadium sized” exposure decided to be long term fans of the artist.
4. The final option is less common, but still does happen: it may be that listeners are skipping your song before the 30 second mark.

It is possible to be marketed specifically to your genre/sub-genre/mood/style, and find that curators like it and add it, yet still a large portion of listeners don’t and choose to skip.

This is uncommon and likely not the reason you aren’t seeing many results yet. However, it can be helpful when this happens so that we can figure out how to make your music more widely resonant to prevent skips and increase your engagement for the long haul.

We begin pitching your song on release day or scheduled promotion date if your song is already out on Spotify.

Most curators respond within 1-2 days of your Spotify promotion start date. Some take 4-7 days. The longest we’ve ever had someone take to response is 35 days, but this is rare.

We don't provide any reporting for the following reasons:

1. Spotify For Artists’ reporting in their dashboard is extremely transparent, detailed, and free. Part of how we keep our costs accessible to our clientele by not charging for any “overlapping” services. We don't want to charge people for something they can already get for free.
2. Many times, a song is growing for reasons outside of our promotion during the time of promotion. Maybe the artist is touring, or the song got added to an editorial playlist, or the artist had a viral social media post, etc. Not providing reporting eliminates the possibility of unintentionally falsely claiming credit for the growth of a song.

We pitch your song to user curators to see if they want to add it. Their consideration is totally up to them, including if they want to add the song or not, where they place it on their playlist, how long they keep it on their playlist, etc.

For full clarity (as expressed in our Spotify Promo Info) we don’t do playlist placement (paying curators for spots on playlists), as that’s against Spotify’s Terms of Use.

We do not pitch to editorial playlists but can help you craft your pitch (see “Can you pitch my songs to editorial playlists?” below).

Additionally, we do not pitch to algorithmic playlists (these types of playlists can only be algorithmically triggered through your song performing well in a specific category).

We do not pitch to editorial playlists on your behalf. However, we have free resources help you do this DIY, taught by Kevin! Click here.

Check out the Spotify Promo Info page.
If you have any other questions, contact us and we’ll hit you back within 2-5 business days.

For all platinum, emerald, and diamond tiered promotions, we design customized video ads for your song and run advertising to get traffic to your music.

We advertise on different platforms for different artists depending on the most optimum location for each artist’s potential audience for each particular song (ex. Rap = Instagram, Southern Gospel = Facebook, EDM = Twitter, etc.).

Advertising increases conversions like song saves and artist profile follows, which raises your chances of triggering the algorithm. The cost of ad design, bidding, and management is included in the Spotify Platinum, Spotify Emerald, and Spotify Diamond promotions.

Advertising increases conversions like song saves and artist profile follows, which raises your chances of both triggering the algorithm and the chances of being featured on a Spotify editorial playlist.

If you’re an artist with good save to listener ratios, increasing followers, and bringing traffic onto Spotify, this greatly aides your chances of Spotify featuring your music.

Simply put, ads help bring traffic onto Spotify. If people are leaving whatever platform they're on to enter Spotify, they are significantly more likely to save your song and follow you because they left what they were doing to engage your music.

The cost of ad design, bidding, and management is included in the Spotify Platinum, Spotify Emerald, and Spotify Diamond promotions.

See answer at "Will I receive a report of the ad performance once the promotion is finished?" under Spotify Ad-Specific Questions.

We do not provide ad reporting for Spotify promos for the following reasons:

1. As a results-based agency aimed to provide premium results for non-premium prices, we minimize experience-based costs that we deem unnecessary to keep our costs (and what we need to consequently charge artists) results-based. This keeps our costs and turnaround time competitive and accessible.
2. Ad reports can be deceiving because clicks don’t always equal streams. This can be for a variety of reasons. The most common reason by far is that those leaving social media platforms to come onto Spotify choose to skip the song within 30 seconds. As a result, Spotify does not count those <30 second interactions as a stream.

We recommend artists log into their Spotify For Artists account for the most transparent reporting, which gets updated daily by Spotify and can be accessed for free.

We do not disclose the ad budget that we spend for each Spotify tier involving advertising - Spotify Platinum, Spotify Emerald, and Spotify Diamond.

While our marketing agency is founded on transparency and integrity, what we deem most important for each client is the results of our product and service, not the breakdown of all of it as far as our own budget or internal processes.

Our margins are some of the most competitive in the industry by keeping our model and systems low-touch with clients to get the highest converting results for the price.

***When we have artists that are looking for a more holistic, hand-held experience, we suggest working with an ad agency and/or designer that specializes in creating high-converting ads for music/artists at an accessible price. We don’t know anyone in this space to refer people to at the moment, which is why we offer this as part of our service.

We create our own ad creative for artists who order Spotify Platinum/Emerald/Diamond, and we do not use ad creative designed by the artist or their team.

We additionally do not send the ad creative we make to the artist for approval or modifications.

Reasons for this include:

1. The back and forth communication modifying/approving ad creative would be an additional cost that we would have to charge for. It would additionally increase our turnaround time. Our goal is to minimize unnecessary experience-based costs and keep our costs results-based. This keeps our costs and turnaround time competitive and accessible.
2. We design ad creative based on high conversions, not brand aesthetic.

***When we have artists looking for more or complete creative control in their ad design, ad copywriting, etc., we suggest working with an ad agency and/or designer that specializes in creating high-converting ads for music/artists at an accessible price. We don’t know anyone in this space to refer people to at the moment, which is why we offer this as part of our service.

We promote ads from our own social media account for all Spotify promos that include advertising (Spotify Platinum, Spotify Emerald, Spotify Diamond).

Doing this achieves the following:

1. It helps keep our labor costs down so we can be more accessibly priced.
2. It avoids the additional time/bottleneck of us working with you to get approved as a member of your advertising team and having the proper permissions to run ads from your account.
3. It avoids the potential of the social media platform billing you for the ad rather than us, as your ad budget for the Spotify promo is included in the purchase of a Spotify Platinum/Emerald/Diamond order.
4. We advertise on different platforms for different artists depending on the most optimum location for each artist’s potential audience for each particular song (ex. Rap = Instagram, Southern Gospel = Facebook, EDM = Twitter, etc.). Getting permission for each artists’ account isn’t scalable at the price points we are offering and for one time purchases rather than multi thousand dollar per month retainers.
5. Most importantly, it prevents your ad account from being flagged or disabled. For more info on this one - the common reason ad accounts get disabled is that their account isn’t warmed up to spend bigger amounts towards advertising their music. Social media companies flag accounts if you boost your ad spend too quickly in order to protect you from fraudulent purchases (ex. in case someone hacked your account and was running ads). If your account gets disabled, you have to make an appeal. Appeals can take anywhere between 24hrs to 18 months to approve. I’ve heard of many artists never getting their ad account re-approved once becoming disabled, even if they did nothing wrong. Due to the amount of advertising money we spend with each vendor, we have direct reps at each major social media company and don’t have this potential problem as many artists do have.

We promote songs on Spotify in a wide variety of genres, including pop, rap, indie pop, rock, country, jazz, Christian, gospel, worship, broadway, alternative, folk, and EDM.

We promote songs on Spotify in English and Spanish. We also promote instrumentals.

If you’re not sure that your song can be promoted due to genre or language, contact us with your song.

After reviewing your song, we will recommend whoever we think we would serve you best, whether that’s us or someone else.

In general, it’s better to spread your budget across several tracks than to promote with a higher budget on a single song.

However, send your songs to use via our song review form, and we will provide our recommendations as far as budget allocation for your upcoming promotions.

We recommend scheduling your release out for whatever amount of time your digital distributor recommends to space out for them to get it to all of the platforms.

Additionally, we highly recommend releasing your upcoming release on a Friday at midnight. To be completely specific: Midnight Friday is the very first minute of Friday. Midnight/12am Friday is one minute after 11:59pm Thursday.

Releasing Friday at midnight is industry standard. It’s also when Spotify editorial playlist curators and user playlist curators most commonly update their playlists.

Read below for mindset recommendations and practical recommendations:

MINDSET:

An important mindset to remember when selecting release dates is that people are not interested in the greatest song, but the most right song for the moment that they are at in life.

Making a great song with a great production that has the potential to be widely resident is great, but it can be sabotaged if you release it at the wrong time (ex. Releasing a Christmas song in February).

In general, we recommend that artists be mindful of how cultural tastes for music seasonally shift, and release their music with that in mind

PRACTICAL TIPS:

Practically speaking, here are some tips:

In January and February, upbeat tempo and emotionally uplifting songs that are motivational and give a “pump up” kind of feeling typically do really well.

In mid-February to early May, songs that are redemptive and hopeful tend to perform well.

From late May to mid August, songs that are musically and lyrically carefree and/or fun tend to do really well. (However, one thing to note about this timeframe is that songs streaming is typically lower in these months because routine is broken due to kids being out of school, parents not getting as much alone time to listen to music, less driving and listening in the car, etc. This is because, when routine is disrupted, engagement is oftentimes disrupted; typically in the negative rather than the positive.)

From mid August to mid October, songs that are moody, introspective, lyrically heavy, or musically emotional tend to perform really well.

From October to Christmas, songs that feel nostalgic, warm, and classic tend to do really well.

Avoid releasing songs on holidays weekends or in seasons that wouldn’t ultimately serve the song or the majority population’s seasonal interests (ex. releasing a Christmas song in February, or releasing a sad or depressing song in the summer.).

See more information at “What days or times should I release my music? What release days should I avoid?” under Spotify Pre-Promo Questions.

We strongly recommend artists release their songs on Fridays. Friday is the industry standard day for releases and when DSPs (Spotify, etc.) most commonly update their editorial playlists.

We also strongly recommend artists set up their release with their digital distributor where it releases at midnight in everyone’s time zone rather than just their own. This way, when an artist announces on social media or emails etc. that their song is dropping Friday at midnight, that information is true for every listener in their global fanbase of various time zones.

Avoid releasing songs on holidays weekends or in seasons that wouldn’t ultimately serve the song or the majority population’s seasonal interests (ex. releasing a Christmas song in February, or releasing a sad or depressing song in the summer.).

See more information at “When should I release my next song?” under Spotify Pre-Promo Questions.

Sure! Immediately after your purchase, just let us know who you have hired. This way, we can avoid any overlap with pitching.

If we pitch to a curator who lets us know that they had already heard the song from someone else, we’ll make sure to pitch to a new curator/playlist so that you get the full value of your service. We offer this as a courtesy; please offer us the same courtesy by letting us know upfront your full plans for promotion if it involves anything else regarding Spotify growth.

No. You keep full ownership of your master share working with us. Our only charge is the upfront 100% cost per song of working with us.

We do not offer payment plans for promotion at this time. If you are on a tight budget, we recommend one of the following:

1. Promote your song at a lower price amount, then re-promote it later if it performs well and when you have more budget.
2. Consider delaying your release until you have budget for promotion.

We pitch your song to genre specific, sub-genre specific, mood specific, and function specific playlists user curated Spotify playlists (NOT editorial playlists or algorithmic playlists).

For example, If you were a pop rock artist with a motivational message and vibe, we *might* pitch you to pop playlists, pop rock playlists, motivational playlists, and workout playlists (if your song was appropriate for all of those categories).

We prioritize the most specific and relevant playlists in our network, then expand more broadly (yet still relevant) to finish up your playlist list.

For most songs/artists, our order for targeting is subgenre specific, genre specific, mood specific, then function specific. However, we will always take an individual approach to your song for what we deem will serve it (and curators we’re pitching to) the best.

Our goal for you is to help you get on the most relevant playlists to your song, as this will most greatly increase your chances of:

1. Getting higher friction conversions (follows, saves, people adding it to their own playlist, etc. and
2. Triggering the Spotify algorithm

As far as framing expectations, you won’t see explosive growth overnight. We’ll likely start to get added to playlists over the first couple of weeks of your promotion as curators approve or deny your song and provide feedback.

Ideally, we’ll get added to a lot of playlists that are sort of existing as “dripping faucets” that will help you grow in a diverse yet relevant audience steadily over time.

We do not touch base mid-campaign.

You can expect to hear from us via email once your campaign is completed, between 14-35 days after your promo start date.

Adding a Spotify canvas is a great way to freely and organically increase engagement on your song. Spotify has put out reports that adding canvases to your songs increases saves and followers.

Here’s Spotify’s video about how to make and upload Spotify canvas: 

It’s very rare that we need any additional information. The only time we ever do is if a curator who is a blogger or podcaster asks for info - which happens about once every 100-150 promos. If this happens, we will reach out via text or email to get that information.

Songs that tend to get the most streams are (listed in order of most common priority):

1. Exceptionally written/produced/mixed/mastered on technical level and a widely resonant/commercial level
2. Invested heavily with paid promotion.
3. Serving a high demand and/or underrepresented listening community (Examples of this include jazz, Christian rap, contemporary worship).
4. Not serving a low demand and/or overrepresented listening community (examples include: mainstream R&B, mainstream hip hop, jam band, mainstream alternative, hyper-experimental music of all genres).
5. Not serving a highly critical community (examples include: mainstream rap, psychedelic jazz, heavy rock)
6. Not a remix, acoustic version, or alternative version of the main version (We typically recommend lower promo tiers for alternative versions of songs for this reason)
7. Under 5 minutes and/or on the shorter side of the typical song length in their respective genre/sub-genres
8. Not a detour of your specific sound, with the exception of seasonal songs for Christmas/etc. (An example of a detour would be a country artist doing a jazz song. In doing this, your followers who follow you for country music will likely not like the jazz song, which greatly minimizes the potential of algorithmic triggering)
9. Has traffic coming in from additional sources (social media, email blasts, blogs, podcast features)

We recommend artists to make marketable songs/productions that are “more right for more people,“ as well as select the most connectable songs in your discography of already released songs.

We’re pleased to serve you! Fill out our submission form, and we will follow up in 2-5 business days with recommendations for a secondary promotion to pitch to new curators and new playlists. to submit your next song for promo review.

In short, yes!

Fill out our submission form, and we will follow up in 2-5 business days with recommendations for a secondary promotion to pitch to new curators and new playlists.

Our recommendation is to continue investing in 4 places:

1. Outsourcing your scaling/promotions
2. Invest in higher quality products (better productions/mixes/masters)
3. Invest in coaches (voice/songwriting/business coaches)
4. Engage your audience (social media, touring, etc.) and your allies (co-writing, social media, digital and in-person communities, etc.)

If you need any suggestions for new producers or coaches, you can fill out our form here to get our shortlist sent to your email:.

Additionally, if you would like 1 on 1 coaching with Kevin, you can learn more information here.

Your monthly listener numbers will reach a peak once all songs have been on the total playlists for 28 days because the monthly listener count rotates daily for the total number of listeners having listened to your song in the last 28 days. From there, it will subtly fluctuate up and down most likely, then fall off as curators drop your tunes off of their playlists to add others and keep their selection fresh and engagement high.

See question “What should I be expecting as far as streaming growth?” under Spotify Pre-Promo questions for more information.

See answer to "What type of songs tend to get the most streams and the least streams on Spotify?" under Spotify Pre-Promo Questions.

Short answer is no.

Longer answer (recommended read):

Each curator in our network voluntarily chooses where they’d like to add the song in terms of playlist song order based on their personal taste.

However, we’ve found that curators typically showcase the following trends in playlist pitching in almost every genre with rare exception:

1. Most curators like to add shorter songs (<4min) that have qualities of being upbeat, uplifting, and/or anthemic at the top of their lists.
2. Most curators add 5 min+ songs in the middle to lower middle range of their playlists.
3. Most curators add calm, moody, or lyrically “deep” or “heavy” songs in the bottom 1/3 or 1/4 of their playlist.

With the above said, the best way to get added by curators at higher positions in the playlists is to follow these trends and have expectations concerning user-curated playlist pitching in line with these trends.

User curated playlists tend to NOT shuffle song order frequently and commonly feature “the hits” - sometimes, even 10+ year old songs.

They don’t rotate as quickly as FM radio stations or DSP-related editorial playlists.

This is very common and to be expected.

A few reasons why:

1. Change too quickly oftentimes results in lower playlist retention.
   
   Example: Spotify’s Top Christian + Gospel playlist used to average 4k-7k streams per day per artist in 2021. Around January/February 2022, they rebranded with aggressive changes to their playlist, Since then, audience retention has dropped to where most artists whose analytics we can see that are on it get 1.8k-4k streams daily on the playlist.
2. Global trends in contemporary worship follow behind USA trends.

Many of our curators live around the world, including the Philippines, Peru, Faroe Islands, Netherlands, etc.

These curators tend to have “more dated” tastes and like to hang onto the older stuff a little longer than USA listeners because the songs are still fresh to them.

See the question above (“Can I work with another promoter for the same song you are promoting?”) for more information.

Feel free to connect your friend or colleague with us via our contact form. From there, we’ll schedule a call with them to get to know them and help them make a game plan for their song!