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Promoting your music is essential in this ever-changing music era. Over the years, Spotify has become one of the biggest players in the music industry and have grown to become one of the best streaming platforms for artists to promote their music, increase their plays and also make an income from the streams hence it’s only logical for music artistes like you to want to increase your Spotify plays.
As an independent artist, having a large fanbase on the platform can really boost your success as a music artist. This fanbase will help to increase your Spotify plays, hence it’s advisable to use the platform’s promotion tools to your advantage.
There was a record of 350 million paying subscribers on streaming services worldwide in 2019 with Spotify at the top of the list, ahead of Apple Music and Amazon music. With this growth, it has become very important for music artists like you to understand and develop your business on the platform and increase your Spotify plays.
Although there’s no secret hack to help you increase your Spotify plays overnight, to achieve the success you desire, you need to implore a number of promotional and marketing tactics to ensure your music reaches as many people as possible.
In this article, you’ll be guided through 10 promotional tips that will help you increase your Spotify plays organically, and how you can utilize these tips irrespective of your genre.
Here are the top 10 tips to help you increase your Spotify plays organically in 2022:
- Make your music unique
- Upload your music on Spotify
- Claim and verify your profile on Spotify for artists
- Promote your Spotify with social media
- Include Spotify widgets on your website
- Be consistent
- Submit your music to Spotify curated playlists
- Pitch your music to independent playlist curators
- Create your own playlists
- Utilize Spotify Ad Studio
Make Your Music Unique
The foundation for success in your music career highly depends on the kind of music you want to put out there to listeners. Especially with streaming services like Spotify, if you want to grab the attention of listeners and increase your Spotify plays, the quality of your music has to be top-notch and unique.
Your music needs to be able to grab the listeners’ attention as soon as your music comes on. You need to make sure your music is properly recorded professionally as this is also a prerequisite to creating quality music to increase your Spotify plays.
There’s a lot of competition on Spotify because, on Spotify, you’re on level ground with label artists who have more access to findings that allow them professionally record their music in expensive studios and create quality music that aids them in increasing their Spotify plays easily. But independent artists like you, may not have access to enough funding but with the growth of the music industry these days, you don’t need to spend excessively like label artists to create good quality music that helps to increase your Spotify plays.
Your music should speak for you. Carve a niche in the kind of music you’d like to release for your fans to have a more targeted audience. This extremely helps to increase your Spotify plays since you now know your audience, what they’ll love to listen to and what connects with them.
Remember to take your time to create your music. You don’t need to rush it because you need music that can stand the competitive music market on Spotify. Hence, take your time to create good, unique music.
Upload Your Music On Spotify
So you’ve made and recorded your awesome music but how do you increase your Spotify plays without getting your song on Spotify? That’s impossible. You need to get your song on Spotify.
This step may seem easy but many music artists do not know how to go about this. All you need to release your music on any streaming platform is a digital distributor. Digital distributors act as middlemen that connect music artists with streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon music, etc.
Two of the most popular digital distributors are Distrokid and CD Baby although there are plenty of other music distribution companies out there with their own unique features and distribution plans. You can explore them and pick the one that fits your plan to help you increase your Spotify plays.
Claim And Verify Your Profile On Spotify For Artists
If you want to get enough from Spotify as a music artist, you need to claim and verify your Spotify profile through Spotify for artists as it is very important in the process of helping you to increase your Spotify plays.
Claiming your Spotify profile allows you to be able to create a music artist page, upload your photo, create a bio and also post about upcoming shows/concerts, etc.
Verifying your Spotify profile gives you that blue tick just like every other verified famous artist you know out there. With the verification tick, fans see you as a more authentic music artist and make them want to follow you and listen to more of your music especially if you put out unique music, indirectly helping you increase your Spotify plays.
It also provides you access to a whole range of tools you wouldn’t have access to if you do not claim and verify your profile through Spotify for artists. This includes allowing you to submit your music to playlists, or access analytics tools that record how many plays you’ve gotten on Spotify, where they’re coming from, and much more features. With this, it’s very obvious how important this step is to help you increase your Spotify plays.
Promote Your Spotify With Social Media
The importance of social media cannot be overemphasized in this year and age especially with its immense effect on the growth of the music industry over the years. Spotify and your social media pages should work in tandem as it’s important to build your fanbase and increase your Spotify plays.
It’s easy to increase your Spotify plays through social media just by letting your social media followers know where they can find your music on Spotify and how to stream it.
To make it easier for artists, Spotify has several tools that help artists and fans share music on their social media platforms. One of the popular tools is the “Share To Instagram Story” feature. This feature allows fans to create a story with the cover art from your music or playlist on Instagram which directly helps to promote your music to their viewers and indirectly helps to increase your Spotify plays.
Fans can tap the artwork and be redirected directly to your song’s page on Spotify. The more fans click on the artwork and are taken to your page, the more it helps to increase your Spotify plays so do not hesitate to promote your music on any social media platform you have.
To learn more on how to promote your music on social media, here’s an article for you.
Include Spotify Widget On Your Website
As Spotify provides a number of tools for social media, it also provides tools you can use to link your Spotify to your music website. These tools will help you promote your music on your website, linking it back to Spotify to increase your Spotify plays.
The first tool is the ability to embed a song, album, or playlist into your website in a form of a widget. This allows people who have subscribed to Spotify to stream your songs directly on your website without returning them to Spotify. This stream is also counted as a part of your plays hence, this method helps to increase your Spotify plays if embedded to your music website.
If some of your fans don’t have a Spotify subscription, Spotify still allows them to play a 30-second demo of your song, providing them the option to sign up and listen to your full song after the demo has been played. So you need not worry about your fans who don’t have a Spotify subscription as this is a way to prompt them to get one that helps to grow your fanbase and increase your Spotify plays.
To use this feature all you need to do is find the HTML code on Spotify and embed it on your website code.
If you’d rather love to have flexible designs on your website, you can use the Spotify play button generator. As the name implies, the Spotify play button generator generates the play button whenever a user clicks the Spotify link to your song on your website. This easily helps to increase your Spotify plays.
Just like the Spotify play button generator, Spotify also offers a Follow button generator. As the name implies, This helps to create a follow button for your website which will easily allow fans to follow you on your Spotify account. This helps you to increase your followers on Spotify and also helps to increase your Spotify plays.
If you wouldn’t embed the widget or a play button on your website, it’s advisable to at least add the follow button to make it easier for your fans to follow your Spotify or an obvious link that directs users to your Spotify account.
Be Consistent
In the music industry, it’s extremely important to release content consistently as content is very key in this industry and One of the keys to help increase your Spotify plays is being consistent with your content.
People often change their taste of music because of the human nature of getting bored, especially when an artist doesn’t release music often. It’s easy for people to forget an artist because there’s no new music to keep them invested in the artist. Hence, you need to roll out new music at intervals to keep your fans invested and increase your Spotify plays at the same time.
It’s important to not overdo this because as much as fans get bored whenever a music artist isn’t consistent with their content, too much of your content could also bore them out and make them want to listen to something new and different hence, you need to be creative and schedule your music releases to make everything balanced.
Being consistent not only gives fans a reason to keep checking you out and eventually become loyal to you, it can also help you to increase your chances of getting on playlists which positively helps to increase your Spotify plays. It also allows you to create PR campaigns on Spotify around each music release.
Submit Your Music To Spotify Curated Playlists
If you want to increase your Spotify plays, do not rule our playlists as they play a big part in helping to increase your Spotify plays. There are three major ways to utilize playlists to your advantage which will be explicitly discussed in this article.
The first is to get your music on one of Spotify’s official curated playlists. To do this, you can submit your tracks for consideration through the Spotify for artists platform seven days before your song release. Spotify helps to explain how to go about this process successfully here.
One thing you must note is that when you’re submitting your track for playlisting, you’re up against hundreds of thousands of other tracks looking to get into that playlist hence why the quality and uniqueness of your music is important.
On the other hand, if you don’t submit it at all, you have zero chances of getting listed on any playlist so it’s better to submit it and hope to get listed.
Pitch Your Music To Independent Playlist Curators
The next best step to help you increase your Spotify plays is to have your music featured in an independent playlist with a lot of followers. Anybody can create a playlist on Spotify meaning there are a lot of independent curators looking for new music to be featured every day.
Although it’s not easy to get on playlists due to the thousands of new songs being pitched to curators for playlisting, for the sake of increasing your Spotify plays, it is well worth it to give it a shot. You don’t need to worry if you believe you’ve created unique music as this will make you stand out to curators.
Create Your Own Playlists
This is a guaranteed way for your music to make a playlist. Although you may not gather tons of plays if you don’t have that many followers, as time goes by, you’ll gradually gather followers for your playlist and also increase your Spotify plays.
Creating playlists is also a way of engaging your current fans and giving them something to share on their social media. It’s important to make playlists of music that relate to your style of music and the genre of your sound. This way your music is always included in the playlist for your fans to stream to increase your Spotify plays.
Utilize Spotify Ad Studio
The Spotify ad studio is a new feature by Spotify that can prove to be a useful tool in helping artists like you to increase their Spotify plays.
The ad studio allows individuals and businesses to create an audio advertisement that plays in between songs on users with free subscriptions. This is an awesome way to practice music Niche marketing and directly target your audience’s demographics.
This tool can be very costly for music artists that are just starting out but it’s worth it if you’re willing to throw a couple of bucks on marketing your music to your target audience. Spotify has also helped in explaining how the process works here.
