Spotify is taking the concept of democratization very seriously.
Last month it announced that independent artists could upload their music direct to the service, and then it acquired a minority share in DistroKid to allow artists to upload tracks to multiple services, via Spotify.
Now, it’s given any artist the opportunity to have their music considered for inclusion in one of its very influential editorial playlists.
In July MBW reported that it had rolled out a beta feature that allows artists, labels or managers to submit unreleased tracks for consideration on Spotify playlists by its 100-strong team of global editors.
Now the feature is out of beta, according to this blog post.
More than 67,000 artists and labels have submitted music since the feature became available, with over 10,000 of those artists actually being added to Spotify’s playlists for the first time.
That’s a potentially career-changing, one in seven chance of being added to a playlist like La Vida Loca or New Music Friday.
No surprise, then, that Spotify is keen to highlight a few artist success stories from the last three months:
The song Be Here Now by Gustavo Bertoni (pictured), for example, was selected to appear on the Acoustic Morning and Fresh Folk playlists. As a result, the artist’s monthly listeners rose from 7,000 to 617,000.
Elsewhere, Brighton, UK-based band Yonaka saw their monthly listener numbers increase from 82,000 to 290,000 when they were added to New Music Friday, while the Dutch rapper Bryan Mg shot up to 33,000 monthly listeners up from 4,600 after landing on the La Vida Loca playlist.
Pop newcomer Jayden Bartels submitted her song Can’t Help Me through the feature and was playlisted for the first time, seeing her track featured on New Music Friday.
According to Spotify, Bartels’ monthly listeners ‘practically tripled’ to 72,000.
“Seeing my music on Spotify for the first time was so exciting, but to see that Can’t Help Me Now made Spotify’s official playlists New Music Friday and Pop Sauce was absolutely incredible,” said Bartles.
“New Music Friday features my favorite artists every week and to see my name on that playlist was crazy and such an honor!”
“Seeing these kinds of numbers and hearing this kind of feedback makes us very happy.”
Spotify
To use the tool, labels are required to submit via the Spotify Analytics platform and artists / managers need to submit tracks via their Spotify For Artists accounts.
In addition to the feature coming out of beta mode, Spotify has also filmed two new episodes of its ‘The Game Plan’ series, called How Playlists Work and How to Get Playlisted.
More than 75,000 artists are featured on editorial playlists each week and another 150,000 are featured on Discover Weekly.
“Seeing these kinds of numbers and hearing this kind of feedback makes us very happy, and while we can’t guarantee them for every artist, every time, what’s especially great about this new tool is, whether your new song is featured in an editorial playlist or not, it’ll always show up in all of your followers’ Release Radar playlists,” said Spotify in a blog post.
“Plus, the additional metadata you provide when you upload it will help us recommend it to potential new fans for years to come.”Music Business Worldwide
