How to submit music to Spotify editorial playlists

Every artist gets one free editorial pitch per unreleased track. It is the only direct channel to Spotify's editors, it takes about ten minutes, and it is quietly one of the highest-leverage things you can do before a release.

What the editorial pitch actually is

Inside Spotify for Artists there is a form called Pitch a song. It appears only for tracks that are delivered to Spotify but not yet released. You fill in genre, mood, instrumentation, culture and a short free-text description, and it goes into a queue that Spotify's editorial team reviews when building playlists.

Two things are commonly misunderstood:

• One pitch per track, and only before release. Once the song is live, the form is gone. Miss the window and the only route back is your next release.
• The pitch does more than chase editorial. Even a declined pitch guarantees the track appears in Release Radar for your existing followers, and the genre and mood tags you supply feed Spotify's recommendation models afterwards. That downstream benefit is the real reason to always pitch.

Step by step

1. Deliver the track to your distributor at least four weeks out. Three weeks is the practical floor; four to six is better. The pitch form does not appear until the track reaches Spotify.
2. Open Spotify for Artists on desktop, go to Music then Upcoming, and select the unreleased track.
3. Click "Pitch a song". If the button is missing, the release has not propagated yet or the release date is too close.
4. Tag it honestly. Primary genre, then subgenre, mood, instruments, whether it has vocals, the language, and the culture or scene it belongs to.
5. Write the description. Around 300 to 500 characters is the sweet spot. More on this below.
6. Add promotion context. If you have a tour, a sync placement, press, or a real social following, say so plainly with numbers.
7. Submit and leave it alone. There is no follow-up channel and no status page. You find out by looking at your release-day numbers.

Tag honestly — mis-tagging is the most common own goal

The temptation is to tag a bedroom-pop track as pop because pop playlists are bigger. It backfires twice: editors filter by tag and will discard an obvious mismatch, and the same tags later inform which listeners the algorithm tests your track on. Wrong tags mean wrong test audience, which means poor engagement data, which means less algorithmic support.

Be specific. If your track is dream pop with shoegaze guitars, say that. Small accurate buckets have less competition and better conversion than large inaccurate ones.

Writing a description an editor will actually read

Editors move through a very large queue. Assume fifteen seconds of attention.

A structure that works:

• Sentence one — the sound. Concrete and comparative. "Sparse late-night R&B built on an upright bass loop, in the lane between Cleo Sol and Sampha."
• Sentence two — what makes this release notable. A story, a collaborator, a context. Skip it entirely rather than pad it.
• Sentence three — evidence. Real numbers only: previous release streams, playlist history, tour dates, press. If you have none, leave it out; empty claims read as noise.

What to do when the pitch does not land

Most pitches do not result in an editorial placement. That is arithmetic, not a verdict on the song — there are vastly more submissions than slots. The productive response is to make the routes you can influence carry the release.

• Independent curators. The largest addressable pool, and the fastest to respond. See our curator pitch template.
• Your own listeners. Saves and playlist adds from real fans are the signals that unlock algorithmic playlists.
• A managed campaign. If you would rather not run the outreach, that is what Spotify playlist promotion is for. You can also test the water first with our free playlist trial.

And importantly: editorial support tends to follow traction rather than create it from nothing. Artists who build genuine engagement on release two and three are dramatically more likely to be picked up on release four.

Timing, in one table