Music promotion guides for independent artists

Practical, honest guides on getting heard on Spotify and Apple Music — playlists, the algorithm, release planning, royalties, and how to avoid the promotion services that will cost you more than money.

Start here

If you are new to playlist promotion, read these three in order. They cover how placements actually happen, what the market charges, and how to avoid the services that will damage your catalogue.

1. How to get your song on Spotify playlists — the four routes and which ones you can influence.
2. How much Spotify playlist promotion costs — real price bands and what each should include.
3. Fake Spotify streams and what they cost you — how detection works and why bot traffic reduces your reach.

Every guide

How to use these guides

They are organised around the four things that actually determine whether a release travels: whether the track is ready, who hears it first, whether those listeners engage, and whether you keep going long enough for the algorithm to notice. Nearly every problem artists bring to us reduces to one of those four.

• If your streams are flat and you do not know why — start with how the Spotify algorithm works and then monthly listeners vs followers. The usual answer is a conversion problem, not a reach problem.
• If you have a release coming up — work backwards from the release checklist, and make sure you do not miss the editorial pitch window described in the pitching guide.
• If you are about to pay someone — read the scam checklist first. It takes five minutes and it is the highest-value thing on this page.
• If you are trying to work out the money — what artists actually earn per stream explains why stream count is the wrong target.

What these guides will not tell you

There is no method that guarantees a breakout, no trick that forces editorial support, and no way to buy your way onto New Music Friday. Anyone selling those is selling something else. What is genuinely controllable is a fairly short list: finish the record properly, give yourself enough lead time, pitch the right people, ask listeners for saves and follows rather than plays, and release consistently enough that the algorithm has something to learn from.

That list is unglamorous and it is most of the job. The guides below are the detail underneath each item.

Why we publish these

Music promotion is a market with a serious information problem. Artists are sold guaranteed stream counts that can only be delivered artificially, told that editorial playlists are purchasable when they are not, and charged for services that cannot be verified. Most of the damage comes from not knowing which questions to ask.

These guides are the answers we give artists who email us before buying anything, written out properly. They are free, they name the things that do not work including some things we do not sell, and they are written so you could run every one of these strategies yourself without ever paying us.

If you would rather have the outreach handled, that is what our campaign packages are for — and you can see how the process works with a free trial on one song before spending anything.