It’s time to stop paying for playlist pitching.

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To clarify, if you’re an artist, it’s in your best interest to never pay for a company to pitch your music to third party Spotify Playlists again.  Simply put, there is no longer a viable path for success when hiring these services. It can only either damage your data or your pocket book.

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In fact, just this week, Spotify has taken down hundreds of thousands of songs for suspected “artificial” streams. Many of the artists, whose songs were removed, claim those artificial streams came through playlist pitching services. [Click here to read more]

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Venture Music has a deep history when it comes to playlisting that has led us to this conclusion. A conclusion we’ve been whispering into as many ears as possible. Well, we’re tired of whispering.

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One of two things will happen if an artist hires one of these playlist pitching services:

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1. At best, they will spend a lot of money on an outcome that doesn’t get close to meeting their expectations; or
2. At worst, their music will become heavily botted; resulting in destroyed algorithms or a banned account. (Not convinced that botting is such a bad thing? Read more on that here.)

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Anecdotally, we have spoken to hundreds of artists in the last year and these are the only outcomes we have seen. As a company that puts our artists first and works to break through the noise to offer creative marketing solutions, it is painful for us to hear clients time and time again tell us about how they wasted money on a strategy that got them nowhere.

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Don’t get me wrong, though. We also get why it might seem like a good idea on the surface. In fact, it definitely used to be. I even ran a side hustle myself doing this early on in the nascent days of playlisting as a promotional tool. But, somewhere along the way -- with Spotify’s playlisting ecosystem becoming a powerhouse that has the potential to break artists -- everything got thrown off kilter. So, let’s dive a little deeper into what happened.

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First, what is a Spotify playlisting service?

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Before we get into where things started to go off the rails, let’s first quickly go over the kind of service I’m talking about; in case you’re not familiar.

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The service I’m referring to is one where an individual will pitch your music to a network of third-party playlists on Spotify. These playlists are owned by users (aka: user-generated playlists), not Spotify.

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Much like hiring a radio promoter to pitch to stations, this seems fairly straight forward. You have a new song, it gets put onto playlists with followers, your music gets heard.

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As I mentioned, this is a side hustle I had for many years as a manager. I can’t speak to how every company operates, but, let me break down the actual work of how I and many of my colleagues did the work of pitching to third-party playlists.

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First, after being tasked with a piece of music, I would dig through Spotify’s algorithm to find similar artists using a tool like Every Noise at Once. Next, I’d use Chartmetric to find keywords associated with many playlists these artists are on. I’d then use these keywords to search in Spotify directly, recording in a database every playlist that seemed promising. Next, I would find the Facebook profiles of the users associated with these playlists to complete the database. Finally, I would friend and message every single one of them.

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As you can imagine, this took me hundreds of hours. Once I had a great database and relationships, it did become easier, but in order to ensure a great algorithmic impact for the music, you’d always need to be on the hunt.

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That said, I charged accordingly for my time. It wasn’t cheap, but it was very effective.

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So where did things go wrong with third-party playlisting?

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Before I tell the dramatic tale of the downfall of playlisting, I need you to understand two very important things.

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1. Initially almost all organically grown, user-generated playlists grew strictly through Spotify’s search function. People would search certain keywords and find unique, user generated lists. As playlists filled the ecosystem, almost all keywords were dominated by only a few playlists. As Spotify diversifies its editorial playlists, there are less keywords for user generated playlists to take advantage of. This makes the amount of highly engaged new playlists rare, creating a finite amount of valuable lists.
2. Many playlist owners weren’t asking for payments when being pitched music; but that changed over time. (it's important to note here that paying for playlists is against Spotify’s ToS)

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This situation is a time-bomb for the value of playlists; due to the fragile and finite nature of these lists. It's an environment where the act of pitching playlists slowly erodes their value.

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As the music industry began to utilize playlists to promote music, it created a feedback loop that eliminated the value of playlists.

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Let’s take a look at a hypothetical to further illustrate how this plays out.

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Joe, a user who works at Starbucks, happens to have a highly engaged playlist that grew organically through Spotify’s keyword search. Suddenly, Joe is being hit up by cool music industry execs asking them to consider his music. At first, he’s more than happy to listen and consider this new music. He only adds the music he likes and is considerate of his current listeners.

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One day, he declines to add a song he feels doesn’t fit, and the person pitching it to him offers him $50 to add it anyways. Joe agrees and adds the song. Realizing that he now can charge, he starts charging everyone.

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The quality of the playlist begins to drop slightly and people begin to abandon it as Joe slowly increases his price due to high competition. Now Joe owns a playlist with low engagement while charging hundreds of dollars per add.  He has numerous “clients,” who paid to be added to a playlist in hopes of getting more streams and engagement on their song, now approaching him about the awful results and the stress of it is overwhelming.

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Fortunately, one of the promoters who regularly paid him to have their clients’ music added to his playlist offers to buy his whole account for $2000 and he is able to offload the stress and make a little cash.

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Without Joe the middle man, the promoter is now able to more easily add the music of his choice to this playlist, further eroding the listenership. This playlist is depreciating in value and he needs a solution, of which he has two:

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The hard way: Run ads driving appropriate traffic to the playlist, full of listeners likely to engage in a healthy way with the playlist, which takes considerable time, money, and knowledge

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The easy way: Run cheap bots to the playlist

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Now imagine this hypothetical in a highly competitive environment where the service with the best engagement is the winner. It quickly becomes a race to the bottom. The cheapest service with the most bots wins.

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Playlist Erosion Summary

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• Paid playlists means lower quality and loss of engagement
• Playlist owners lose interest in accepting new submissions and either sell, bot, or ignore their playlists
• Bots have slowly taken over previously valuable playlists
• Newly created playlists are mostly botted
• Playlist erosion created a market ripe for scammers

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How bad can playlist botting be for me, though?

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I’ve explained the above to quite a few artists and a couple have pushed back, saying the potential downsides of being botted are worth the risk.

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First, let me be clear. There is no risk, you will be botted. Not once in the past year and a half have I had a client pay for playlisting that didn’t get botted.

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What are the consequences of being botted?

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1. You will likely lose all algorithmic presence on Spotify. We’ve worked with clients who were doing 5,000 streams a week through the algorithm when they decided to hire a playlisting company. After a few botted playlists, this number went down to zero. It will happen to you.
2. You will waste your money. Even in a perfect world without bots, these playlists are full of passive listeners. When the campaign is over, you will be taken off these lists and lose the majority of those streams. Compound the issue with bots, you’re basically paying for hot air. You’re not fooling record labels or agents either. They know what to look for when it comes to a Spotify account.
3. You can be banned from Spotify forever. Yes, forever. I have had more than two dozen conversations in the last year with artists who haplesslessly paid for botting to a degree their whole accounts were completely erased from Spotify. Appealing this with Spotify is next to impossible and I’ve yet to see a single artist allowed back on the platform.

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So who can I hire? Are playlists useless as a growth and marketing strategy?

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Short answer: Who can you hire solely to pitch your music to playlists? No one. Are playlists useless? Definitely not.

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Longer answer: There are still honest companies out there who are trying to pitch playlists that are not paid or botted. I’m familiar with a few who want to do the right thing.

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It's just not economically possible any longer to provide value through playlist pitching.

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The honest way of pitching doesn’t provide enough streams or algorithmic impact to create value for what you pay.

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Furthermore, botting is too difficult to avoid. Even the most honest playlist pitchers will be tempted to look the other way when pitching to a dubious playlist. Sometimes they won’t even be able to tell if a playlist is botted.

But if you want help with playlisting, follow this rule of thumb -- don't hire someone who is taking your money solely to pitch your music for inclusion in third-party playlists. Work with a person or company that utilizes playlists as just one part of their holistic digital marketing strategy.

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This is an indictment on pitching services alone, not on the value of playlists. There are still ways to incorporate playlisting into your strategy.

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For better or worse, your Spotify profile is your artist resumé. It's the place that the world, including the music industry, goes to see what you have going on. Instead of throwing everything at it to see what sticks, you should treat it like a garden that needs tending, which includes pulling weeds. Take your time with building your profile, make sure the listeners you send there are interested in your brand. Don’t take the easy way out because it’ll only cause you issues further down the road.