Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 39

If what follows – talk of analytics driv-
ing a song’s “success,” of music being a
“loss-leader,” of telling your fans to do
your bidding for the sake of major tech
companies – all rubs you the wrong way,
yeah, we get it. But it is what it is, and this
is how it works.
*This isn’t 100 per cent true. With
Spotify for Artists, ahead of a song’s
release, artists can fill out a pretty
detailed form on the song and it’s
basically their chance to sell Spotify’s
editors on the release. Of course,
thousands and thousands of these
are submitted every week, so the
chances are slim, but it should still
be done.
How to Get on User-
Generated Playlists
It’s not just luck. With a smart, targeted
strategy, indie artists can get their songs
on some valuable user-generated play-
lists. There is also a burgeoning industry
of playlist-pitching companies that, for a
price, will send music to playlist curators.
Let’s look at both options.
DIY Playlist Pitching
In essence, playlist pitching (also called
just “playlisting”) simply means sending
songs to a targeted group of playlist
makers. It’s not complicated. To do it well,
though, requires time and research.
Breuner’s own example is one to
follow and stems from an instrumental
guitar player who uses CD Baby. Breuner
noticed this guy was getting 500,000 or
600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify,
almost all through playlists, and so he
asked how this happened and employed
the same strategy for his band.
“I created a spreadsheet and I started
finding all these playlists on Spotify that
our band would fit. You need to go deep,”
he stresses. Breuner tested numerous
keyword searches on Spotify, trying the
many terms people might use to describe
his band’s sound/mood/genre, and cata-
loged the playlists that fit. He also went to
the profile pages of similar artists to see
which user-generated playlists they were
on. Out of respect to the curator and to
not waste anyone’s time, he followed the
playlists and listened to make sure they
were a good fit.
“Then I would see if I could track [the
playlist creators] down online. A little
internet stalking goes a long way,” he
laughs. “It’s probably a bad habit we all
have, but most people’s Spotify username
is the same on Facebook and the picture
they use on Spotify is the same on Face-
book. So, in most cases, I was able to find
playlist curators within five minutes. Then
I would message them and say, ‘Hey, I
am so-and-so from this band and I was
checking out your playlist and love it. I
feel like our music would be a good fit.
Here’s a link, check it out.’”
Breuner was actually surprised at
how successful this strategy was. He
estimates about 50 per cent of the peo-
ple he contacted replied to his message,
and about 30 per cent added Smalltown
Poets to their playlist. “All it was, was time.
There was about a solid month where I
was up from, like, 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. do-
ing this every night and it actually made
some good things happen; it was just a
matter of putting in the work.”
Somewhere between this completely
DIY approach and hiring a playlist-pitch-
ing service for a full campaign, which can
cost several hundred dollars, is a service
called SubmitHub. Breuner has used it
and, given how inexpensive it is, says that
it is worth trying out. With SubmitHub, for
only a few dollars per song, artists can
submit their song to a targeted group of
playlists curators, which are mostly blog-
gers and some media.
“We have artists who can’t afford to
do playlisting campaigns and have to go
out and do it themselves. For them, we’re
a fan of SubmitHub,” adds Erin Kinghorn,
the owner of eEK! Productions, a Toronto-
based traditional and digital marketing
company, and co-founder of Digital Pro-
motions Group (DPG), which specializes
in playlist pitching and streaming pro-
motion. “If you want to pay for it, you can
actually get comments back. For some
people we’ve been developing over the
years, it’s good to actually see that kind of
feedback on the song or video.”
Paid Playlist Pitching
Campaigns
More established artists, or those with
money to invest, can hire a playlist pitch-
ing service for a campaign, such as Go-
odrich’s Playlist Push or Kinghorn’s DPG.
“We always say, ‘OK, where are we
starting from?’ Does this person have
zero monthly listeners and this is their
first song on the platform? Or are they al-
ready getting on those major Spotify play-
lists with millions of streams? Everyone’s
expectations should be different, but
we’re basically just an accelerant of what
you’re already doing,” says Goodrich.
Beware: there are services that will
take anyone’s money to send their songs
to some curators, but both Goodrich and
Erin Kinghorn of DPG &
eEK! Productions
For our full conversation on play-
listing with Erin Kinghorn, listen to
the Nov. 20, 2019 episode of the
Canadian Musician Podcast
Kinghorn say that any worthwhile playlist-
ing company will be selective in who they
pitch for and will turn down artists who
they feel aren’t ready.
“For us, it comes down to the song
more than anything else. We work
cross-platform and all genres and world-
wide, so that means it’s not just user-
generated playlists on Spotify. We’re also
looking to people who are creating play-
lists on YouTube and SoundCloud and
all the other components. We also don’t
pitch directly to the [streaming services’]
curation editorial teams; that’s what
record labels, managers, and artists are
doing themselves,” explains Kinghorn.
The good playlisting companies all
work a little differently. Some, like DPG,
do three- to six-month campaigns across
multiple platforms with a rollout strategy
for three or four songs to get the ball
rolling for an album or project. Playlist
Push is just focused on Spotify (though
has its eyes set on YouTube for the near
future) and does one song per campaign,
with pricing based on how many curators
they’ll reach. The credible playlisting com-
panies have a large database of curators
with detailed stats on their playlists and an
understanding of what’s suitable for each.
“As with radio promotion and pub-
licity, we can’t guarantee that we will get
you a million streams; we just can’t,” says
Kinghorn about DPG. “We’re trying to
help artists salt the pot. So, say you got
on a New Music Friday playlist on Spotify.
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