4 Techniques For Getting Playlisted

Passive income sources are more important than ever right now, of which streaming is one of the best – particularly if you can land your music on a few playlists. Here we look at what you can do in order to increase your music’s chance of getting playlisted.

Guest post from the ReverbNation Blog

One of the best ways to receive passive income is from your streaming revenue. To get a consistent revenue stream, having your songs placed on playlists is very important. Depending on the playlist size, you can receive consistent streaming numbers as well as a solid following. So in this post, I’d like to offer four ways you can get playlisted to build a consistent revenue stream.

1. Pitch yourself to User-Curated Playlists

The biggest work of playlisting is pitching your songs to playlists. The easy part is to search for keywords, genres, or related artists that you sound like and find playlists. Once you find a couple of playlists that you can see your songs in, check out the curator of each playlist and write their name down. Then, try to search for the person’s name online. Hopefully, you can find them in one of the social networks, or by email. 

Once you find the person, make sure you listen to the music in the playlist before you reach out to them. Your message should be short, polite, and to the point. Then, send them your message with your links, and hopefully, it will get accepted. Make sure you follow the playlists and share them on your social platforms so the playlist curator also gets more followers. 

Getting placed in user-curated playlists may not be as rewarding as editorial playlists, but they usually have a consistent listener rate and they are great to build up analytics!

2. Get Placed in Larger, Editorial Playlists

Many larger playlists are curated by in-house curators of platforms. And besides good music, curators also care about another thing – having great playlist analytics. If your songs have a large skip rate and are not listened to, it’s not a good sign. On the other hand, if they are listened to a lot, they are being saved in listeners’ libraries, or they are being placed into playlists, this is a great sign and increases your chance of being placed in a larger playlist. So, release as much great music as possible. As you keep doing this, this will hopefully get you placed in larger playlists down the road. 

Looking to get added to some top-notch playlists? Search ReverbNation Opportunities today.

3. Get More Followers

When it comes to getting into larger playlists, one of the things taken into account is your follower rate. The followers are people who actually follow your music actively, and are interested to hear more music from you. When you release a new song, these releases get pushed out to them, so they have a higher playlist placement. Having a high follower rate is very important for playlisting success.

4. Create your own playlists and promote them

You can curate your own playlists based on genre, theme, or mood. You can get your followers to follow your playlists, and you can also get more people to discover your music through these playlists. The cherry on the cake is if you get a lot of followers in one of your playlists, you get to curate the music of other artists and also get your songs in them too. For these reasons, creating your own playlists and promoting them is essential!

Final Words

To sum it up, these are the four ways to get playlisted and to get a consistent, passive revenue going. It is really nice to get a steady monthly paycheck from your music, and right now, we have the tools available for it. 

Just like many highly rewarding avenues in the music industry, it takes a lot of hours to get your music to more people on playlists. I know it seems challenging, but pitching your songs is not so different than trying to book a gig. What matters is to remember that the name of the game is persistence. If anyone could pitch their music and get one million followers in a month, then everyone would do it. Our advantage as musicians is that we are the content creators for streaming, and there are a lot of listeners. I think as independent musicians we should take advantage of it. After all, streaming is here to stay and it is not going anywhere, anytime soon.