How to spot a Spotify promotion scam

Music promotion is a market with real services and a great deal of fraud sitting side by side, using identical language. These are the signals that reliably tell them apart.

Ten warning signs

1. Guaranteed stream counts. The clearest single tell. Nobody can guarantee human listening behaviour. A guaranteed number means an automated source.
2. Prices that cannot pay for human work. Real curator outreach takes hours. 50,000 streams for $30 is not a bargain, it is a different product.
3. Claims of editorial placement. Nobody sells New Music Friday or RapCaviar. Those are Spotify's own editors and they are not for sale.
4. Instant delivery. Genuine pitching takes days to weeks. Streams arriving within hours are automated.
5. No genre questions. If they never ask what your music sounds like, they are not matching you to anything.
6. Requests for your login. No promotion service needs your Spotify, distributor or social passwords. This is the point to walk away immediately.
7. No named policy on underperformance. "Satisfaction guaranteed" with no defined terms is not a policy.
8. Follower counts as the only quality metric. A 200,000-follower playlist with no real listeners is worth nothing.
9. Testimonials with no verifiable artists. Stock photos and first names only.
10. Pressure tactics. Countdown timers, "3 slots left", aggressive follow-up. Legitimate services do not need urgency theatre.

Questions to ask before paying

Send these verbatim. The quality of the answers tells you most of what you need to know:

• What exactly is guaranteed, in writing?
• Are placements on playlists with real, active listeners, and can you show me examples in my genre?
• How will I be able to verify the placements myself?
• Do you guarantee stream numbers? (A yes here ends the conversation.)
• What happens if the campaign underperforms?
• Is this a one-time fee or a subscription?
• Do you take any share of my royalties? (The answer should be no.)
• How long does the campaign run?

Vague, defensive or evasive answers are themselves the answer. A service confident in what it delivers can describe it precisely.

What a legitimate service actually promises

The pattern is straightforward: legitimate services promise the things they control — pitching, placement, reach, effort — and are honest that listener response is a variable. That distinction is why we publish estimated ranges rather than guaranteed stream numbers on our campaign packages page.

How to verify a campaign after it runs

You do not have to take anyone's word for it:

1. Open Spotify for Artists and check "Discovered on". Real placements appear as named playlist sources driving your streams. If claimed placements never appear here, they did not happen in any way that mattered.
2. Search the playlists yourself. Are they real, active, updated, genre-appropriate? Does the follower-to-track ratio look sane?
3. Look at your save rate. Real listeners save. A large stream increase with a collapsing save rate is the signature of artificial traffic.
4. Check the geography. A sudden concentration of listeners in a region with no other trace of your audience is a red flag.
5. Watch what happens after the campaign. Real placements leave behind followers. Bot traffic leaves behind a number that quietly gets removed.

If the numbers point to artificial streams, our guide on what to do about fake streams covers the cleanup.

Free trials: useful or bait?

A free tier can be either. The distinction is whether the free version is a smaller instance of the real service or a lead magnet with nothing behind it.

Good signs:

• It does the same thing as the paid tiers, at smaller scale
• No card required
• No auto-enrolment into a subscription
• The paid pricing is published openly, not quoted after you hand over details

Bad signs: a card required "for verification", an automatic trial-to-subscription conversion, or a "free" offer that turns out to require a purchase to activate.

Our own free playlist trial pitches one track to a small genre-matched set with no card and no subscription — it exists so you can judge the process on evidence rather than on marketing copy.

The underlying principle

Pay for reach — the work of getting your music in front of real people who might like it. Never pay for a number.

Reach is something a service can genuinely deliver through relationships and effort. A number can only be delivered by manufacturing it, and manufactured numbers cost you royalties, risk your distribution account, and teach the recommendation systems to stop showing your music to anyone.

Everything on this checklist is downstream of that one distinction.