How Do I Get My Music On Spotify?
Today, streaming services are the primary way listeners consume music. Spotify is currently the most popular streaming service with over 100 million people worldwide paying for Spotify Premium. Over 217 million people use Spotify monthly if you include free users. If that’s not enough to convince you to get your music on Spotify, they’ve paid well over $2 billion in royalties since their inception in 2006. These are huge numbers, and it would be wise for any artist on the rise to get their music onto Spotify as soon as possible.
How Do You Get Your Music on Spotify?
There are two ways: through a record label or through a Spotify-approved aggregator. If you belong to a record label, they will take care of everything for you!
If you’re an independent musician, you’ll need to sign up for an affiliated Spotify aggregator. The most popular aggregators are CD Baby, TuneCore, DistroKid, Ditto and LANDR. Once you belong to one of these services, you can now upload your music onto Spotify for a small fee of the royalties you earn from Spotify.
Once your music gets approved from Spotify, you’ll need to create a Spotify account and upload information such as a bio, photos, genre, tour information, etc. Once you acquire 250 followers, you will reach ‘verified’ status and you’ll be ready to take off!
How Do You Promote Your Songs on Spotify?
You can’t just place your music on the Spotify platform, do nothing and expect to top the charts. There’s a lot of work that must be done in order to get your music heard. Other than all of the standard offline and online music promotion methods, you can promote your music through Spotify itself.
Without the right connections, Spotify marketing can be extremely difficult. That’s why you hire music PR agencies who have the right connections and proven music promotion methods. Established music PR agencies include services like Spotify playlisting, Spotify ads and Spotify campaigns.
Spotify playlisting is the Holy Grail of Spotify marketing. Some Spotify playlists have millions of followers. All it takes is for your music to get promoted on one popular playlist to take your career to the next level. However, don’t feel like you need to belong to the biggest and baddest playlists in order to have Spotify marketing success.
These playlists can get expensive to be featured on and they often have a high turnover rate with so many artists bidding on spots. It can also be very effective to get your music on many smaller playlists that align with your exact target audience. Music PR firms are experts on getting your music to the right playlists.
Other methods to promote Spotify streams are including the Spotify play button on your website or blog posts, using social media ads and partnering with other artists to cross-promote each other’s material.
How Much Does Spotify Pay?
After all, is said and done, the typical rates Spotify pays is between $0.006 and $0.008 per stream. There is some variance depending on the countries that are streaming your music, the amount of paid vs. free users and the artist’s royalty rate. This may not seem like much, but with access to tens of millions of people, it can add up!
What Next?
If you want to promote your music on Spotify, there’s no better place to start than to partner with a leading music PR firm. WMR Media is a leading hip hop PR firm that has connections with the top Spotify playlists in the market which can give your music hundreds of thousands of streams in no time! Check out WMR Media’s Spotify packages here.