6 Essentials for Playlist Pitching

With these six important steps, learn how to expand your fanbase and make your playlist pitch stand out.

Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog

Playlist curators get tons of pitches from artists just like you wanting to get featured on their playlists. Although there’s no magic method for getting chosen, there are many things you can include in your pitch to give it the best chance of getting accepted. Here’s everything our team recommends you should always do when pitching your music to playlist curators…

Open Strong

At the beginning of your pitch, be sure to include your hardest hitting pieces of information. Whether that be your best highlight or recent milestone, key industry moments you’ve been a part of or major features your tracks have gotten, it never hurts to start strong.

If your best highlights are from social traction, include that too. Anything you’re particularly proud of, show it off first.

Include Important Features/Details

Next, make sure to include any additional, relevant features or collabs you’d like to show off. That includes upcoming shows or festivals, if you’re opening up for another artist soon, or any other significant projects you have coming up. This also includes the mood & genre of the track you’re pitching. If it doesn’t fit the playlist, it’s not going to make it on. Don’t waste your time submitting to random curators whose playlists don’t actually fit your vibe.

Give Context

Especially if you are relatively new to releasing and pitching music, you want to give the decision-makers some context for why the song is important and what makes it unique. – What’s the story behind the release? Why does it make sense on their playlist? Is it culturally relevant at the moment?

All this makes your submission more memorable and helps your track stand out among hundreds of other songs. (On this note, the fact that you wrote the song during the pandemic doesn’t make it unique. Dig deeper.)

Claim/Update All Your Profiles

Claiming your Spotify For Artists, Amazon Music For Artists, Apple Music, Deezer for Creators, and Pandora AMP pages brings a bunch of benefits. In addition to being able to customize the information and imagery on your artist profiles, you can also gather some terrific insight on how your music is performing on these platforms.

With Spotify for Artists specifically, you’ll find information about editorial support, streams contributed by both Spotify-owned and third-party playlists, and you can dig into a TON of information about your audience at Spotify. There are also several on-platform tools in the Spotify For Artist platform that can be made available when you claim your profile like images, banners, Clips, Marquee and more.

• Need help doing this? Check out, “How to Claim your Label/Artist Pages” to learn how.

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Promote Like Crazy

The more you promote your track and get it some traction online, the better the chance of it getting playlisted. For example, this can mean doing things like:

• Streaming the track via Instagram Stories and including a link to it via the “Swipe Up” feature.
• Name dropping for producer, songwriter, mixing/ mastering, video director (if they are worth mentioning) on socials and getting them to share it.
• Making TikTok’s, Instagram Reels, etc. with your track.
• Pushing fans to create their own content with your track.
• Creating a SmartURL to use across socials so fans can choose where to stream your music without having to search for it (which you can do right in the SMS, thanks to our partnerships with Feature FM, Hypeddit and Found.ee).

In addition to promoting your own music, it doesn’t hurt to shout out and follow the playlist you want to get featured on. Show your love for them, and they just might return the favor.

Be Genre Specific

Spotify has a lot of playlists for many genres, so classifying a track in the right genre can help the editors place it in the right playlist. Making sure you’re only submitting music that makes sense for the playlist you’re applying to saves both you and the curator time and energy. (i.e. don’t try to pitch your soft lofi track to a country playlist… duh.)

In Conclusion…

Although there’s no perfect method or process to get you featured, these steps will definitely increase your chances. With a little luck and a great strategy, all your hard work will pay off.

Good luck!