The truth about the popular Playlist Promotion platform [Brian Hazard]

Indie musician Brian Hazard, who I hereby name the Tim Ferris of music marketing experimentation, digs into the popular Playlist-Promotion.com platform and shares the results.

by Brian Hazard of Passive Promotion

I’d heard good things about Playlist-Promotion.com before their manager Andi reached out to me in mid-July. He offered me a campaign valued at $350 for the purpose of a review.

I knew they could deliver a good number of placements and streams safely (my #1 priority), but I worried they didn’t have enough playlists specific to synthwave/synthpop.

Andi shared my concern and asked if I had songs in another genre. I provided him a link to my (not Spotify’s) This Is Color Theory playlist and he came back with three selections he thought would work for pop, indie pop, electro pop and indietronica playlists.

We settled on my new (at the time) single, “The Rot.”

I gave Andi read-only access to my Spotify for Artists account so he could monitor the results on his end, and promptly departed on a late summer family vacation.

My Playlist-Promotion.com Results

When I returned, a full report was available:

My song had been added to 26 playlists with a total follower count of 682.3K.

A $350 campaign promises a follower reach of 100K, meaning they over-delivered by nearly 7x.

Andi assured me that the 100K figure was only a minimum. Depending on how well the song is received by curators, it can go higher. I’m not complaining!

Here’s a full list of the playlists my song was added to:

While my song is objectively not a “hit” in any sense, much less an 80s or 90s hit, the placements were on target.

I appreciated that there were:

1. No fake soundtrack playlists ✔️
2. No workout playlists ✔️
3. No copyright free Twitch playlists ✔️
4. No TikTok playlists ✔️

Those seem to be the bread and butter of most playlisting services.

Other than “insomniacs” and “store music,” the playlists are all built around a particular musical style and/or period.

That means they’re likely to feature music similar to mine, giving me the best chance of reaching fans of my genre. Or at least not mucking up my Fans Also Like section any more than it already is! (don’t get me started)

Of course, follower reach doesn’t say anything about how active the playlists are. Some small playlists generate impressive stream counts, while some big ones are virtually dead.

Here are my Spotify for Artists playlist stats after three months. I’ve circled the Playlist-Promotion.com placements.

Playlist-Promotion.com is responsible for 32K of the nearly 43K streams of the song since the campaign launched:

That number is still rising! My song remains in the top two playlists after three months, which is surprising because curators are only required to keep them in for 30 days.

I reached out to Andi to make sure I wasn’t getting special treatment, and he said it happens all the time. Either the curator really likes the song or forgets to remove it.

Normally you wouldn’t want over 70% of your streams to come from playlist promotion. Fortunately my other songs are doing well enough that, looking at my catalog as a whole, “other listener’s playlists” only account for 27% of my streams (and that includes my own playlists).

As you probably guessed from the playlist names, they mostly reach Spanish-speaking countries, where retro music has a strong following:

Keep in mind that the above stats are for all streams of the song, not just Playlist-Promotion.com placements.

The top cities look completely reasonable, with no obvious outliers:

Playlist-Promotion.com Conclusion

I feel entirely confident recommending Playlist-Promotion.com.

With so many artists’ music being taken down for botted streams, it’s more important than ever to find a company you can trust. Every service promises “100% organic Spotify promotion” but many (most?) of them are either lying or hiring out a service that is lying to them.

If you’d like to try out Playlist-Promotion for yourself, you can get $30 off using coupon code “PASSIVEPROMOTION” (no quotes) here.

I’ll make a small commission, which will go towards further experiments.

The only other playlisting service I know is legit is Moonstrive Media (my review here), which specializes in SEO playlisting. Their playlist network is unlikely to overlap with Playlist-Promotion.com’s, so you could potentially try both out either sequentially or simultaneously and reach a broader selection of curators.

Brian Hazard is a recording artist with over twenty years of experience promoting a dozen Color Theory albums, and head mastering engineer and owner of Resonance Mastering in Huntington Beach, California. His Passive Promotion blog emphasizes “set it and forget it” methods of music promotion.
Catch more of his promotional escapades in his How I’m Promoting My Music This Monthemail newsletter.