8 Effective (and legal) Tips to get More Streams on Spotify
Are you looking to increase your Spotify streams? Here are eight effective techniques and practical tips to boost your play counts and grow your audience without breaking the rules.
by Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog
There’s always been a lot of talk about some supposed secret, foolproof hack for boosting your streams on Spotify overnight. Now whether those tricks are legal or not… is up in the air. However, there are actual, legitimate ways to improve your streams that don’t involve illegal bot farms or black-hat tactics. In this post, we’ll give you real, honest, and effective ways to boost your streams as an artist looking to do it right.
Optimize Your Spotify Profile
Your Spotify profile is the first point of contact between you and potential listeners. It serves as the most important way to represent your brand and your music. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to optimize your profile to showcase what you have to offer to the best of your ability. Ensure that you have a high-quality profile picture and header image that represents your brand. Write a compelling bio that tells your story, and make sure to include links to your social media accounts and website.
Not only that, Spotify revamped their artist profile design to help artists get even more from the platform with features like Artist Pick, Popular Releases, Clips and more. (To tap into some additional features you may have missed, check out “5 Spotify Features You Should Be Taking Advantage of as an Artist”.) In the meantime, utilizing all these features helps showcase your profile and everything it has to offer.
Improve Your Social Presence
Some platforms are good for engagement. Others are better for reaching as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. As an independent artist, it’s important to understand how each platform can best benefit you. If you want to get more streams, you’ll have to direct your fans from socials to your Spotify somehow… (How? I thought you’d never ask.) 😉
Whether you use TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or all of these combined, the trick is to connect them through properly linking each of these together across platforms. For example, if you have a new album out, make sure you link to it in your IG bio. If you use TikTok, make sure you’re making content with your tracks and linking back to Spotify. Same goes for any other platform you frequent. Making sure everything ties together is the first step to simplifying the way your fans find your music.
Keep in mind, Instagram has the best engagement rates of all the platforms when it comes to musicians. The ability to post photos, as well as video, is a plus for anyone looking to post content from their shows, behind-the-scenes footage, user-generated content, and more. In addition, hashtags work wonders for targeting specific audiences, and your bio offers a perfect home base to redirect your fans not only to your Spotify, but all your other socials, merch, tickets, and so much more.
Promote Your Music with Spotify Codes
With Spotify Codes, you can share any track, album, playlist, or artist profile with the click of a button. If you’ve got a Spotify URI for it, you can generate a Spotify Code.
Since it can sometimes be difficult to link followers to external URLs on socials, you can share a picture of your Spotify Code instead. Ask fans to take a screenshot, and they can link right to your music with it. These are also perfect to use on visual media such as posters, flyers, merch, and also on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
- To find a Spotify Code, click on the ellipsis (“…”) next to the artist, song, album, or playlist you want to share. Then, you’ll see the code on the bottom of the artwork.
- Click on the artwork with the code, then save the image to your camera roll by clicking, “Save to Photos”.
Run a Spotify Ad Campaign
Year after year, Spotify’s ad format has proven itself to be more engaging and successful than traditional display ads. With 602M+ Monthly Active Users globally 100% logged in, all the time, running ads on Spotify can significantly improve your reach on the platform. In turn, getting you more fans, and more streams.
The foundation for building your campaign starts with Spotify Ad Studio. This tool is where you’ll build and manage your ad campaigns for your releases. Spotify’s platform makes it easy for anyone to create and manage audio ads. Spotify Ad Studio gives you the ability to:
- Create audio ads on the platform
- Reach unpaid Spotify users (these are users who haven’t subscribed monthly to the service)
- Target users based on demographics, interests, mood, music preference & platform type
- Target specific artist’s fans (only if you are an approved advertiser that is clearly promoting the artist(s) or an event that they are performing in your ad)
- Forecast impression estimates
- Retarget users that have engaged with your previous ads
- Create sequential messaging to tell a story about your brand
- Track campaign results
To learn more about advertising on Spotify with the Spotify Ad Studio, check out, “The Artist Checklist to Advertising on Spotify” to learn everything you need to know about the process and how to get started.
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Get Playlisted
For artists looking to get their music shared with listeners on a global scale, getting featured on Spotify playlists are a great way to do that. The two main kinds of playlists you can get featured on are Algorithmic Playlists & Third-Party Playlists.
Algorithmic playlists are auto-generated based on things like listening history, trends, and most-shared music. Spotify’s algorithm is taking note every time someone saves your music to their queue, library, or their own playlist and takes into consideration the number of followers you have. All these factors can help you land a spot on one of these playlists. — If you’re a Symphonic client, we offer playlist pitching for you. However, to ensure your music has the best chance possible you’ll need to do your part. For example, by submitting your marketing drivers, providing accurate metadata, optimizing your Spotify profile, and more best practices right here.
When it comes to third-party playlists, these are easier to submit to and directly target specific niches with dedicated listeners ready to discover artists just like you. For example, SubmitHub lets you submit your music to playlist curators, get your songs rated by fellow artists, and chat with others in the industry. It’s a great place to get quick feedback on your tracks, and get into playlisting at the same time. Another great option is Groover. Groover gives artists the ability to promote their music to blogs, radios, labels and Spotify listeners. Plus, they guarantee feedback in 7 days. With Groover, you can also stay in contact with the connections you make on the platform and manage follow ups with just a few clicks.
(There are tons of other platforms who offer third-party playlisting services, too. Check some of our favorite options out right here.)
📚 Important Note: You cannot pay to get on an official Spotify playlist. If someone or a third party company is offering placement on a playlist in exchange for money, what they’re really doing is illegal streaming manipulation. We did a whole post about this called, “Why Independent Musicians Should Beware of Streaming Fraud” that explains this even deeper. 📚
Release Music Consistently
Consistency is good for engagement on any platform, no matter what you’re into. Want to get better at production? Practice every day. Want to improve your vocals? Sing every day. The same theory applies to putting out music. The more you do it, the most traction it’s going to get. And let’s face it… your fans want as much from you as they can get. When you release new music on any platform, the amount of people who will interact with it will grow right along with you as long as you remain consistent.
Utilize Spotify Presave
Presaves are similar to preorders. A pre-save for a Spotify campaign allows your fans to connect on Spotify and automatically add an upcoming album or single to their Spotify library when it is released. Additionally, fans can automatically follow the artist or a playlist and have the album added to a new or existing playlist. With this feature, you can promote an upcoming release by giving your fans the opportunity to save it in advance prior to the actual release date. That way, they’ve got it saved and ready to go for the moment it finally goes live.
Setting up presaves for your upcoming music has a ton of benefits. From organically growing your audience to increasing engagement on your profiles, presaves offer an additional way to market your music that takes only a couple minutes to set up right in the SMS. To help you out, we’ve partnered with Hypeditt and Feature.fm to make it easier than ever for our Symphonic clients. Check out, “How To Set Up PreSaves Using Symphonic” to learn how it works.
Engage With Your Fans
At the end of the day, one of the best things you can do to grow your audience on Spotify is to engage with your fans yourself and form personal connections with them directly. Show them you care by commenting back on socials, doing a giveaway here and there, taking the time to talk to fans one-on-one at your shows, anything you can do to show your appreciation for the fans who make your job possible in the first place.
Offering exclusive content is a great way to do this. With exclusive content for only your most dedicated fans, you can not only thank them for their past support, but also give everyone else a good reason to get more involved. From early access to upcoming tracks, music videos, merch (and even ticket sales), to private fan community access through Patreon or Discord, there’s so much you can do to give back. Check out, “6 Types of Exclusive Content For Fan Engagement” to learn more.
The connection between fan and artist is a strong bond that will last the test of time only as long as you nourish it. No matter how big you get, always take the time to thank the people who got you there. Not only will it get you more streams, but it will grow your community the old fashioned way and ensure they’re here to stay.
In Conclusion…
Getting more streams on Spotify is directly correlated to the work you put into it. Building a sustainable music career takes time, patience, and dedication. By utilizing Spotify’s internal tools, mastering your social media game, nourishing your fanbase and consistently promoting your work, you’re on the right track to gaining more listeners in no time. It’s up to you to put in the time and effort, but we’re here to provide as much assistance as we can along the way.
Good luck!
