How to get your music on Apple Music playlists

Apple Music has fewer listeners than Spotify and almost all of them pay. For artists, that changes the maths — and the platform is chronically under-pitched because most promotion advice ignores it entirely.

Why Apple Music is worth your attention

Three structural differences make Apple Music disproportionately valuable relative to its size:

• There is no free tier. Essentially every listener is a paying subscriber, which typically produces a materially higher effective per-stream rate than Spotify's blended average of paid and ad-funded listening.
• Far less competition for placement. The vast majority of independent artists pitch Spotify only. The submission queues are shorter.
• Library adds are a strong signal. Apple's equivalent of the save is central to how it surfaces music, and it correlates with genuinely committed listeners.

The counterweight is scale: Apple Music's audience is smaller, so a comparable placement reaches fewer people. The sensible approach is both platforms, not one — which is why we run Apple Music promotion alongside Spotify campaigns.

How Apple Music playlists are structured

The structure mirrors Spotify's closely. The practical difference is that Apple's independent curator ecosystem is smaller and less saturated, so a good pitch stands out more.

Submitting through Apple Music for Artists

1. Claim your artist profile at the Apple Music for Artists site if you have not already. Verification can take a few days, so do it well ahead of a release.
2. Deliver the release to your distributor at least four weeks out, same as Spotify.
3. Use the pitch form in Apple Music for Artists for the upcoming release. Availability varies by region and distributor, so check what you have access to.
4. Fill in genre, mood and context accurately. As with Spotify, mis-tagging costs you more than it gains.
5. Include real context — tour dates, press, prior performance. Concrete beats enthusiastic.

Some distributors also pitch to Apple on your behalf. Check what yours offers before doing the work twice.

Optimising your Apple Music presence

• Add lyrics. Apple surfaces time-synced lyrics prominently, and lyric search is a real discovery route. Most independent artists never bother, which is exactly why it is worth doing.
• Keep the profile current. Photo, bio and artist images render large in Apple's interface.
• Use Shazam. Apple owns it, and Shazam data feeds Apple's discovery. A track that gets Shazamed is a track Apple notices.
• Encourage library adds explicitly. "Add it to your library" is Apple's equivalent of the save and carries similar weight.
• Set up your artist page milestones so returning listeners have something to see.

Running both platforms without doubling the work

Most of the pre-release work is shared: one master, one set of artwork, one metadata pass, one delivery to your distributor. The platform-specific work is the pitch, and each takes about ten minutes.

A practical split:

• Do both editorial pitches in the same sitting, three to four weeks out.
• Run curator outreach on both — the playlists are different, so the same track can be pitched to two separate ecosystems.
• Weight paid campaigns toward where your audience already is. Check your existing listener split before deciding.
• Track them separately. Apple's dashboard reports differently; do not compare raw numbers across platforms without adjusting for audience size.

Most services only cover Spotify. We run dedicated campaigns on both, which you can see on the campaign packages page — or test the process first with our free playlist trial.

Realistic expectations

Apple Music campaigns typically produce lower raw stream numbers than the equivalent Spotify campaign, because the audience is smaller. What they tend to produce instead is a higher effective royalty rate per stream and listeners who are more likely to be committed, since they are all paying subscribers.

Judge Apple campaigns on library adds and repeat listens rather than on stream volume compared against Spotify. Different platform, different denominator.