How To Use and Benefit From PlaylistSupply

As an independent artist, you have a lot to keep up with. Spotify playlists are high up on the list of “overwhelming things to manage.”

The more streams a song gets, the more monthly listeners an artist has, the more your clout builds and the more the gods of the algorithms will reward you and allow your song to be heard by more and more music lovers. In order to get plays, you need to be added to playlists.

This is a lot more easily said than done as getting on one of the approximately 3,000 Official Spotify playlists (and counting!) is not exactly easy to do as an indie musician.

So, for the rest of us, we must turn to pushing our fans to the platform coupled with a strategy of getting on some of the 4 billion user-curated playlists (yes – you are reading right – 4 BILLION) 

But what most artists run into is – they have a hard time finding the right contact info for playlist curators. My team and I were recently approached by the founder of PlaylistSupply who generously offered us a free trial and we liked what we saw!

Here’s a quick rundown of how it works and what we think of the platform.

Hello PlaylistSupply

While SubmitHub and Daily Playlists are great tools for getting your music onto playlists, there are so many more playlists that have great numbers and boost streams for any artist. To find them, you can use a tool called PlaylistSupply. How this tool differs is the way it scours Spotify and spits out the best playlists for your genre. They also provide the contact information for playlists pulling information from the “summary” section. From there you can contact the playlist owners and ask for a spot on their playlist.

How to Use PlaylistSupply

PlaylistSupply’s Quick Search

PlaylistSupply is simple to use and effective in landing a spot on a playlist. By using their “Keyword Search”, you can type in anything and get results. Finding the right keywords and searching within your niche is the most effective. Some examples of “Keywords” include: Country, City, Language, Emotion, Location, Workout, Trends, TikTok, etc..

To complete your search, you will need to fill out the criteria section. This is the criteria by which you can contact a playlister. Email is the most effective, but you can also search social media handles and similar artists’ social media/emails. 

By pressing the “Exact” box, your results will have the exact parameters you specified in the keyword section. If you want the exact search for “Heavy Rock,” those words will appear somewhere in the search.

Other Criteria Include:

Nothing – This will return results of a broader range of playlists and even give you playlists with no contact information. This criteria is mostly used for other forms of research, A&R’s, or people searching for playlists without contact info.

Social – This will return the tags for the playlister, prioritizing Instagram and Twitter. This is great for more organic outreach by connecting through DM’s.

Instagram – This will return results for the Instagram handle of the playlist.

Twitter – This will return results for the Twitter handle of the playlist.

Similar Artist – This runs a search of every artist similar to the one you type in the Keyword section. It primarily works for artists with larger audiences and more mainstream genres.

Similar Artist and Email – This runs a search for similar artists to any artist you type in AND emails for playlists at the same time. It combines the Email search and the Similar Artist search in the same option.

Keyword Search Results

When the system gives you your results, it provides you with the playlist name, owner name, when the playlist was last updated, the amount of followers a playlist has, and its popularity assigned by Spotify on a scale from 0 to 100 (the higher number being the most popular). All these aspects will help you determine which playlists are going to be best for you and your music.

PlaylistSupply also offers you the ability to copy and save the playlists you search for by saving them to your playlist database within your account. It then downloads an excel spreadsheet, and a PDF file, and copies the list to paste elsewhere. 

Use the Organic Search Feature

PlaylistSupply’s Organic Playlist Search feature indexes Spotify’s high-quality “Discovered On” Playlists and targets them directly. You can now search by any artist name and PlaylistSupply will gather all “Discovered On” Playlists and their playlist owner’s contact info. This feature is designed to take out the playlists that have lots of bots streaming your music rather than real people. After testing it ourselves, the playlists that came up using this feature were real and offered real streams.

Pricing

While this tools is not free to use, it’s definitely something worth looking into. It’s a strong investment.

The PlaylistSupply Basic account (that doesn’t include the Organic Search Feature) is $19.99/mo. With this you get:

Our Review

Playlist Supply provides an easy way to create a list of viable playlists to pitch to. The most helpful parts have been the “Last Updated” feature, which tells us if the playlist is even active, and the “Save to my Playlist Database” feature, which monitors the changing in followers of a playlist and keeps all the playlists you want to pitch to in one place. Both of these features give you an accurate picture of the best places to get your music more streams and less time wasted in pitching to playlisters that won’t reply. You get a variety of playlists with each pairing of keywords and criteria.

And, for only $19.99/month, it’s one of the cheaper offerings out there.

Tips and Tricks We Found

If you have the Organic Search feature, most of these tricks won’t be necessary as it takes away a lot of the fake accounts for you. But, if you don’t have that feature, here are some things we learned by using the basic search tools:

• We suggest you start your search with the “email” criteria or the “similar artist email” and expand your search after that. This is because the more popular and more followed playlists feature an email in their description as they typically require payment. Because of this, they tend to respond more quickly than over a social media inquiry. You will know within a few hours whether or not your music can be placed.
• We found that you get the best results when you ask the system to be exact. Before you do a search, click the “exact” box and you will get the most accurate results.
• The broader the keyword the better. Use the genre is the keyword search, like “folk singer songwriter” or “heavy metal,” as most playlists have that in the name. As of right now, the more specific you are in your keyword search, the less results you’ll get.
• Sometimes, the system spits out playlists with no contact information or any way of getting in touch with the playlister. This just means that you may not be able to pitch to them the traditional way. What we do, and suggest you do as well, is take the playlist name and/or curator listed and try and find them on social media, SubmitHub, or any other public playlisting platform. You may find them with some further research.
• Do not be scared of smaller playlists! You don’t have to only pitch to the ones that have more than 15,000 listeners, potential fans lie in the smaller playlists as well so don’t not pitch to a smaller playlist just because its numbers aren’t impressive.

What to Be Aware Of

Most of the playlists that you pitch to require payment for placement. Unfortunately, that’s the norm right now in the industry. That being said, 9 times out of 10 it’s worth the price. Most are pretty fair for the number of listeners a month. Remember, if the price doesn’t match the amount of likes and streams, don’t pay. There are also a good amount that don’t require payment, but a follow or a like and a share, a form of social repayment.

When we tried this with some of our clients, we found that with the playlists we pitched to, in addition to SubmitHub, traditional emailing, and other playlist submission platforms, your song can be streamed anywhere from 200 to 300 times a week and your monthly listeners grow in tandem.

We hope this post helps give you a basic startup on using the Playlist Supply platform.

For more tips and tricks that’ll help boost your playlisting capabilities, download our FREE Music Marketing Checksheet today!