The Perils Of Paid Playlisting
By Cassie Whitt
Refreshing the artist page over and over looking for new listens. Calling your fans to action and waiting for the listener numbers to rise. It’s a lot like that whole “a watched pot never boils” phenomenon. It can feel hopeless when you eventually start checking in less and reprimanding yourself more for an algorithm largely out of your control...
Then, you see another artist of your size and calibur suddenly getting plays you wish you were. Some digging leads you to the playlists they’ve been featured on. If they’re multitudinous and don’t make much sense, money might have been exchanged for their placement.
Once upon a time, paid playlisting could be beneficial, and in times of great distress and hair-pulling, artists would resort to shelling out hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of dollars to get on the right lists. The “right lists” could actually get you somewhere and create genuine listens and convert listeners.
However, over the years, the pay-to-playlist market has become oversaturated, thus dulling the niche curation and effectiveness of playlists. In addition, the phenomenon of paid listeners from demographics that don’t make sense for an artist ultimately muddied artists’ branding and made them harder to find among actual similar artists rather than the artists with whom they’d been lumped in an anything-with-money-goes collection.
So, when you’re watching the numbers stand still and feeling desperate, what’s the next move? At 180dB, our team of artist consultants combine years of marketing and branding knowledge to help you turn a potential listener into a listener, a listener into a follower, a follower into a fan and a fan into a consumer.
Discovery destruction aside, there’s a new reason paid playlisting is not the way to go.
“Spotify has allegedly removed tens of thousands of indie songs for ‘artificial streams,’” according to Digital Music News
Using third-party services that create stream manipulation or “fake plays” in exchange for money is against Spotify’s terms of service and “could result in your music being removed from Spotify.” It seems, however, that this is something many artists only recently noticed being enforced with a mass purge of music from the streaming service at the beginning of this month.
Some who have reported their music being removed for fraudulent streaming are currently at a loss, saying that they did not, in fact, use any paid services for plays. There is even a Change.Org petition currently open to restore the music they believe was wrongfully removed.
So, when you’re watching the numbers stand still and feeling desperate, what’s the next move? At 180dB, our team of artist consultants combine years of marketing and branding knowledge to help you turn a potential listener into a listener, a listener into a follower, a follower into a fan and a fan into a consumer.
Interested in a new path? Contact sales@180dBArtists.com for a free consultation with our team!