How to use genre playlists in your marketing strategy

0:00 The niche genre playlist promo idea

In this video I'm going to talk about the almighty niche genre playlist promo approach. We're talking about creating a playlist of your music, like here I am, Marmalade Mountain, sprinkled throughout this playlist of songs that are all from other artists in my niche. That means it's a very genre-specific playlist, outsider folk rock in this case, but it could be anybody, you can use this for any genre, and it's very effective.

0:41 Why it works: collaborative filtering and shared discovery

The idea is that by promoting this playlist, it's almost like operating a record label or a compilation CD, and everybody on the playlist benefits from the promotion, which creates associations between the artists, especially within Spotify's system. If you remember from the earlier video on Spotify's recommendation system, it uses collaborative filtering, which says if people who like this artist also listen to this other guy, then it's going to show that guy to people who listen to Mo Troper but haven't yet listened to him. So it improves my discovery to all the other artists on this playlist, and that's happening for all of us. We're all starting to get recommended to each other.

1:35 Playlist saves and cross-discovery in action

As a result of this playlist being actively promoted, it has 5,400 saves. That's because I promote it, and any good playlister should be promoting their playlist. That's what makes them good, beyond the playlist itself being good, which is a different art. The trick is that by promoting this playlist strategically, I'm creating all those associations, and when you start exploring those artists, look who shows up: 'Discovered on,' there I am. Pick another one, 'Discovered on,' there I am again. It's just across the board because it's a potent move.

2:16 Beating editorial and label playlists

I'm beating out some big playlists here, this promoted playlist is beating out Fresh Finds Rock, Noisy, and Undercurrents, which are all Spotify playlists. It's beating out a Pitchfork playlist, it's beating out KEXP playlists and all kinds of stuff. So when you actually promote your playlist well, you have the ability to reach a ton of people, benefit everybody on your playlist, and strengthen associations and improve discovery of your own work. It's f*****g powerful stuff.

2:56 Stacking a playlist campaign with an album campaign

If you combine this playlist promo approach, running a campaign promoting a playlist, with a campaign promoting an album, you can do some heavy lifting, so that's a really effective move. Now that this is a sizable playlist, updated per submissions, we have a link where you can submit songs to this playlist, at least as of right now, that might change, it's an experiment. Because we're taking submissions, we charge a small fee for that, and that money goes into the promo. We actually lose money on it as of right now, but we're probably going to adjust that. The idea is that you can start to self-fund the project.

3:32 The recipe: ads, curation, and submissions

Essentially, you put together an advertisement campaign, you curate a playlist, then you can take submissions either through SubmitHub, Groover, or do what we did and start your own submission thing, which is hard, but you can start paying for advertising to promote everybody's music at the same time. Super effective move. This is one of my favorites.

3:56 Reading the streaming data in Spotify for Artists

I'm also going to show you data about what this looks like inside Spotify for Artists. Here we are, this is the last seven days, and we're not putting a ton of money into ads on this right now, it's underperforming because I f****d up the ads recently by running some new experiments on them. You'll start to see that's always the case, you're always running experiments and things go up and down. I haven't optimized this yet so I know these numbers could be higher, but it's fine. In the last seven days, 593 streams for the very first song on the playlist.

4:43 Why the drop-off was lower than expected

If we go back, the next song, 'Many Years Ago,' is all the way down at track number seven, and it's not even getting that many fewer streams, 423 versus 593, usually drop-off is much more and I'd expect it to be more. So this is surprising, I think I may have switched these songs in order, maybe that's why it's a little closer. In general I'd expect around 40% drop-off by song number seven, but what's wild is this goes all the way to the end. Look at the difference between the last two songs of mine on the playlist that I can track, track 24 and track 33: almost everybody that makes it to track 24 makes it all the way to track 33. That's a lot of streams coming from one playlist.

So I'm getting a lot of value out of this ad campaign, in that it's promoting all of my songs at the same time, at different levels because there's going to be drop-off, whatever's at the top of the playlist is going to do better, but it's also creating these strengths of association with all these other artists. Plus I'm able to take submissions, which helps me pay for the ad campaign and spreads the brand. This is really valuable stuff.

6:11 A gift, not a pitch: reframing how you promote it

Have fun making playlists and promoting them, I highly recommend it. One other thing I want to say: when you create a playlist like this, it doesn't feel as much like 'hey, listen to my album.' So when you're advertising it, instead of saying 'go stream my new single,' you can say 'I made you a playlist, here it is.' And if you curate it and update it on a regular basis, people are more likely to come back. Because it feels more like a gift, it's usually cheaper to get conversions to get people to the playlist, and people are more likely to come back because the playlist itself is always evolving, and it's not just you, they might not want to just listen to you. So it does a lot of different stuff for you at the same time. It does a little bit less for you in terms of the strength of connection in fandom, but it does a lot more for you algorithmically.