from Hacker News

I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to

by pgl on 2/20/21, 5:25 PM with 109 comments

• by throwaway13337 on 2/21/21, 11:53 PM

  All these market places are finding new ways to extract money from the market. There is no incentive to stop until it only makes just enough sense for the content creators to not stop making content. As they are monopolies (mostly), there is no moving. All extra profits, efficiently, to them.

  This is happening with Airbnb, Amazon, Shopify, and now Spotify? We pay a cut to be in the platform, then we pay for marketing on the platform. It's obvious who holds the cards.

  Our feudal lords now have catchy names.

• by sickcodebruh on 2/22/21, 1:38 AM

  This was very interesting, I had no idea these services existed. I really enjoyed reading it. It wouldn’t hurt to provide more context about the artist, genre, and scene the artist is operating in. Is it a band getting some hype that listeners might recognize by name or someone totally unknown to listeners?

  Related to that, what about the playlists themselves? Did the author of this blog post feel that they were grouped with artists of a similar enough genre the audience would appreciate them? Were those playlists all new/upcoming artists sourced from services like this, primarily popular/established artists with a few select artists mixed in, or a mix of both?

  The psychology of what music people choose to pursue is fascinating and brutally frustrating. Details like the ones above could tell some very different stories about the author’s experience. It’s possible that a different artist would have a vastly different experience on these services.

  Of course, having said that, I would have been blown away if this experiment yielded any significantly positive results. This is the newest face of pay to play events and compilation CDs run by labels and marketing companies. There are no shortage of people eager to exploit the enthusiasm of artists.

• by midasuni on 2/22/21, 8:24 AM

  This suddenly all makes sense. I’ve been listening to a “mamma Mia 1+2” playlist as I couldn’t see the albums immediately.

  The all of a sudden some awful explicit song starts playing, nothing to do with ABBA, not even in the same genre.

  Reported the playlist for being deceptive. I note today it has a different song in there now.

  Spotify need a setting to avoid this stuff otherwise they’ll start losing passive customers like myself who pay £15pcm to listen to music that we want to listen to without thinking about it.

  Give me a setting to avoid all “social” things like public playlists or watch as your revenue goes to Apple or amazon.

• by moolcool on 2/21/21, 11:45 PM

  Payola laws should be extended to include Spotify pay-to-play IMO

• by wodenokoto on 2/21/21, 11:31 PM

  I don't know who the audience this article was aimed at, but it would have been nice if it talked a little bit more about what a curator is.

• by frabjoused on 2/22/21, 3:59 AM

  A much more effective way to get listeners is to write about it and trend on HN.

• by tjbiddle on 2/22/21, 1:17 AM

  $130 isn't enough to really test most advertising methods, unless you're already really dialed in.

  I operate e-commerce businesses, and I'd throw at least $500-$2,000 on testing something new before I call it quits.

• by Lorin on 2/22/21, 9:39 AM

  There are a ton of playlists named after songs / albums that are not on Spotify with unrelated songs, pretty deceiving.

• by darkwizard42 on 2/21/21, 11:24 PM

  Really liked the article and am curious what would happen with some of these numbers if you 10x the budget...

  Based on the effort required even after submitting and getting approved on some of these sites (I also didn't know these sites even existed! very cool to learn about that), the author had to do some sifting and understanding of what they were getting into (ex. getting into a playlist of 500 songs and being #500 seems like crap). Sounds like investing more and getting on more lists might help with your odds of getting good placement/good playlists but ultimately requires a linear scale of time invested.

  It also seems like the author got exposure to labels for what I think feels like a low price (especially if you aren't well connected in the industry already).

• by dawnerd on 2/22/21, 1:04 AM

  Can we stop calling people influencers or curators if they’re just taking money to promote stuff?

• by motohagiography on 2/22/21, 12:52 AM

  Tried submithub, it says you have 2 "credits," when I uploaded a song and it takes you through a bunch of commitment steps and then asks you to pay to submit to the reviewers because you don't have enough "credits" to spend.

  If you want to try submithub out, be ready to pay with a card, regardless of what the UX seems to imply. It seemed like a good service, but now I don't see myself dealing with them.

• by wyxuan on 2/22/21, 2:12 AM

  Was this experiment conducted before, or after the purge from playlisting services botting the streams[0].

  Also Spotify should have some way of distinguishing services that have paid playlisting and not - the same way youtubers(or any other influencer) has to disclose if they're doing a sponsored spot. It feels a little scummy that they're doing this.

  [0]https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/01/spotify-just-purged-...

• by kjakm on 2/22/21, 9:11 AM

  The title here is deceiving. The author did not pay for playlist placements. The services they used allow you to submit your song to multiple blogs to be reviewed. If they like the song they may write about it and some may include it on playlists (e.g of songs they’ve reviewed this month).

  The money paid is for the convenience of contacting these bloggers, I don’t believe they get a cut of it. Also, it’s mostly a flat rate. You can’t pay an arbitrary amount of money to guarantee anything other than the blogger giving your song a fair listen.

• by bawolff on 2/22/21, 3:54 AM

  The authors conclusion is "Paying for Spotify playlist promotion does not relate to an increase in followers. Do not use it if this is your goal."

  And in the end, the author spent $130 on sketchy marketing and got 10 followers.

  But honestly, $130 doesn't really sound like that much money, it doesn't really sound like this was exactly super targeted, and it was super short term (repeated exposure is important in marketing). Maybe the conclusion is that this was just a poorly done marketing campaign, which unsurprisingly got poor results.

• by unnamed76ri on 2/22/21, 4:27 AM

  https://open.spotify.com/artist/3BYSJ9i8xIlXO9ebJO9Yv9?si=2y... I’m going to try submithub with my music starting tomorrow. I currently sit at 3 listeners this month. So we will see what happens.

• by nocredits_org on 2/23/21, 3:34 PM

  This made me consider paying for promotion. Although, I don't see what would be the end goal with a limited budget. Have my ego stroked for 100$? I wonder how much would you need to invest for a decent chance to snowball into breaking even.

• by giarc on 2/22/21, 3:29 AM

  You have to go meta and publish a blog post about what getting to the front page of HN does to your plays?

• by happyconcepts on 2/22/21, 3:26 AM

  Did you target JP or EN language audience? Or else can you target by geolocation?

• by wombatmobile on 2/22/21, 2:17 AM

  What does the music sound like?

  Link?