Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 40

“First off, it just doesn’t help you out
at all. Second, they will pull your music
down and it gets marked as fraudulent
activity,” says Breuner. “I actually had to
help a very high-profile person in the in-
die community… who did this and got his
music pulled down and I had to help him
get it restored and it was not fun. They
get really angry about it, so you don’t
want to mess with that stuff.”
Playlist Push’s George Goodrich
That lasts six days and then you’re kind
of done. Our job is, ‘What are the things
you’re supposed to be doing after that?’
Because your song is not done after six
days. You still have to keep working it
and that is the service that we’re trying to
provide. Then, when you go back to the
curators and editors at Spotify and
such, you can actually show
that you’ve been … successful
outside of that and can show a
track record.”
With these campaigns,
artists shouldn’t focus on the
direct financial return (i.e.
streaming royalties). You would
need a ton of new streams to
break even on the investment.
But, Kinghorn adds, “I know
that a lot of … labels and agen-
cies and managers are looking
at Spotify [and social media]
numbers to see if there’s
growth before engaging with
artists. So, is it going to break even?
I come from the opinion that in the last
10 to 15 years, your music isn’t the thing
that’s ‘making you money’; it’s your tour-
ing and merchandise and all the other
things around it and your music is your
loss-leader. It’s how you draw fans in and
it’s how you’re going to be drawing your
team in, so you need to be working it,
but it’s going to actually cost you … to be
dealing with.”
Essentially, hiring a playlisting company
can be like hiring a publicist to boost
your profile.
DO NOT Pay for Streams
There are companies out there often
running ads targeted at artists on social
media that promise to boost the artist’s
stream count by a certain amount. Do not
hire them. They’re likely using illegitimate
means, like bots, to artificially inflate
stream counts. The streaming services
do not take kindly to this.
40 C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N
Analytics Do the Heavy
Lifting
Like we said, getting songs on user-
generated playlists is the first step. After
that, the analytics determine if the song
will be picked up by the algorithms for that
middle tier of Spotify-branded playlists.
“I actually tell people you don’t want
to get on one of those massive playlists
until you’re ready, because if your song
is just below Drake and Rihanna and
SPOTIFY FOR ARTISTS
everyone skips it, that is going to lose you
that spot on that playlist the next time
it updates. It basically tells Spotify that
nobody likes your music, which could
put you in a hole for future releases on
the platform. The best thing to do is get
the music out to user-generated play-
lists. That helps you build data for your
profile,” says Goodrich. “Playlist Push can
help you get on playlists, but if people
aren’t saving your song and they don’t
like it, you’re not getting those repeated
listens.”
Spotify and the other services are
tracking the performance of every song
to determine whether it’s connecting
with listeners and should, therefore, be
included on other playlists. The main
analytics are: repeat listens (self-explan-
atory); skip rate (i.e. are people pressing
“next” to skip to the next song); likes (do
♥
they hit the ); and “adds” (are they add-
ing it to their own library and playlists?).
If listeners are doing these things,
then the song has a good chance of
climbing the pyramid, but beyond cross-
ing their fingers, is there anything artists
can do to help this happen?
Educating Your Fans
While streaming is obviously popular,
general music fans have little reason
to understand the finer details of how
it works. So, artists literally need to tell
their fans how to support them. In the
pre-digital world, it was simple: buy the
CD, support the artist. Now, there is a bit
more nuance to it.
Right out of the gate, when a song
or album is released on the streaming
services, how it performs on the first day
can give it a big boost by showing that
fans are eager for it. One way of mak-
ing this happen is to run pre-save
campaigns. This can’t be done
natively in Spotify, but there are
online marketing services – Show.
io and Presavetospotify.com being
examples – that can facilitate these
campaigns. By enlisting fans to
pre-save a song or album ahead of
its release, artists can boost their
stream-to-save ratio in the first day
or two after release, which triggers
the algorithms.
At shows, on social media,
through newsletters – wherever
artists are talking directly to their
fans – it’s smart to trumpet: “If you
can do these simple things, it’ll really
help me out.” They are fans after all, and
want to help the artists they like, espe-
cially if it takes no money and little effort.
So, artists can ask fans directly to follow
them on streaming services, save songs,
and add songs to their own playlists, etc.
There are also actions artists can
take once they get a playlist placement
to help their cause. An important recent
development by Spotify is that for its
algorithm-generated playlists, it now
sends artists a notification when their
song gets added. In this notification,
Spotify provides a shareable link to the
playlist. Here’s the important part: if
an artist shares that link and someone
clicks on it, that artist’s song will appear
first in the playlist.
“Also, make sure that you’re promot-
ing the playlists you’re getting on, no
matter whether it’s Spotify- or user-
generated, because there’s a partner-
ship there,” says Kinghorn. “There are
tastemakers who are trying to build