When I worked for a major record label, we conducted a survey to see if we could uncover a hidden gem to get our music heard by a wide audience.

Maybe there was a growth hack which we simply hadn’t thought of, and without understanding the consumer behaviour surrounding music there was no way we’d discover this.

When searching for music promotion and how to get more views on Youtube for your music video, we were disappointed to see how many people were spending their money to look like they were receiving a lot of traffic and popularity, to find that it serves no greater purpose than an an ego massage.

The results of this survey told us that the majority of music lovers discover new music through Spotify playlists.

This didn’t come as a huge shock, but it really hit hard just how few people paid attention to radio stations and music TV channels.

So we started working closely with distributors and brands to get our artists’ tracks included on their playlists.

Not only did this help with plays from the playlist, but this helped us attract the Spotify algorithm which got us listed on the Discover Weekly playlists.

So here’s our tips for getting your music on Spotify playlists:

If you have the budget, Hire a PR company who has the contacts to push your music to playlist curators for brands. Be careful with Music PR though, we’ve found that some companies can take your money and produce no results. Create your own playlist — Creating your own playlist and advertising it yourself could put you in a strong position to promote your own music. Artists can now create playlists through their own Spotify profile, or create a playlist such as “Perfect music to listen to while cooking” or “Ultimate USA Road Trip”, choose something niche. Then spend your time advertising the playlist on social media, search on twitter “Road Trip” and reply to every single person who is going on a road trip that you suggest they subscribe to this awesome playlist that would compliment their journey. Add bands on to your playlist who have a large social media following, and message them saying you’ve added them in hope that they share your playlist with their followers There are many companies such as Ditto who take submissions for their widely followed Spotify playlists. We think it is definitely worth your time to submit your music to each of those. Finally, you can use a service such a Burstimo, this is a database of thousands of Spotify playlists where you can rent space on users playlists. Usually the bigger the playlists the more money you have to pay. But from £5 per month per playlist we found it was definitely money well spent.

I hope this helps, and please comment with any questions.