Spotify’s New Personalized Playlists May Impact Where Your Music Appears

Appearing on one of Spotify's playlists has, in many ways, become the Holy Grail of the music industry for up and coming artists, but doing so could soon get harder, thanks to the platform's rollout of its 'personalized playlists'. Here, we look at the impact and how artists can work around it.

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Every artist wants to appear on one of Spotify’s playlists since it adds instant credibility and streams as new people find you. It’s never been easy to crack one of these playlists, and the service is about it make it a little harder with the new “personalized playlists” that it will be rolling out soon.

Personalized playlists are basically playlists that are customized to the taste of every Spotify user. They feature a set of songs that comes from the curator team, and a number of tracks based on individual listener habits that are determined by an algorithm. What that means is if you finally break into that playlist that you’ve been trying so hard to get on, your song still might not appear on everyone’s version of that playlist, since they’re now customized per listener.

The Work Around

Don’t fret – we have a way around it and it’s actually a good thing. Within your Spotify artist account you can see the playlists that your songs have been added to already, but soon the platform will add a blue “Personalized” icon next to the ones that use that feature.

There are unique links next to each playlist that you can share with your fans. The good good news is when they click on the link they’ll get the playlist and your track will appear at #1!

That sounds great, but there are some caveats. First of all, the link is only good for 7 days from when the song is first added to the playlist, and second, you’ll only be #1 on the list for the first 24 hours.

That means you have to act fast to take advantage of your top-of-the-playlist status, but it’s worth the effort because being #1 does gain you some credibility, and we all want more of that.

Keep in mind that the personalized playlists are being tested on about 1,000 playlists, and it hasn’t rolled out platform-wide yet.