Ariel: Hi, I’m Ariel, but you already know that, and today my special guest is Mike Warner who wrote this. (Work Hard Playlist Hard) This is a book that you must buy. Why must you buy it? Because no one knows what the hell they’re doing on Spotify, and Mike wrote one of the best guides – actually, it’s the best guide that I’ve read. In the pre-call, we talked about how simple this book is but, yet, very complicated. So, welcome, Mike! It’s so great to have you here.
Mike: Wow with an introduction like that, Ariel, should we just end this now, just end on a high note? That was amazing.
Ariel: No, no we can’t because I wrote this many questions, so, no. No, you’re here, you’re staying here. Please do let everyone know who you are and how you got here today.
Mike: So I’ll give you the short version, and I’m sure the long version will come later in this conversation, but I started out as a music lover at a young age. Never picked up an instrument in my life, but always had a love for music. Growing up would listen to mixture of Guns and Roses, Michael Jackson, and NWA – Ice-T and Ice Cube. So, a very broad mix. My love of music sort of grew from there into other genres, as well. So, funk, soul, the list goes on. When I was old enough to go out to nightclubs in Australia, which is only 18, I realized that I wanted to get more involved. So, I started handing out those cards that would get people to go into the venue and in return they would get a drink. You would hope that they would stay and actually spend some money as well. From there, I wanted to do more, so I started talking to the DJ’s and the MCs, and then I did a course called DJ MC Bootcamp, which is not as intense as it sounds. It was 5 hours per day, for two days, in a five-star hotel, learning how to beat match and talk on a microphone. But that gave me the basics that I needed to get out. So then I started DJing and MCing as well – so, getting on the microphone and talking and amping the crowd up. From there, I went into production. Years later I wanted to start creating music as well. I was never the best producer, but I always had good ideas, so, I realized how important collaboration was and started creating music with two friends. We created our own electronic group called Date Night. As a result of that we’ve now put out one album, we’ve got probably about 25 tracks online currently, and when we started releasing music together as Date Night we decided to go independent. We realized that we’re in a position where we could, because we’d sent our music to the labels, they weren’t really responding and weren’t really interested in us at the time. We put it out and coincidentally at the time I was moving to the US, and so I had a lot of free time on my hands because I couldn’t work yet. So, I would spend – every single day I would wake up, work out, and then I would sit at my desk and I would look into ways to promote and market our music online, and that led me to discovering that there’s people out there that don’t work for Spotify or Apple music – they’re tastemakers, and they’re essentially just a person like you or me that has playlists that have significant followings on them and if you get your music on there, you can get a significant number of listeners and – most importantly – real listeners and fans. So, I kept learning and learning and learning, to the point where people were coming up to me and asking me for advice – which I would gladly always give. I started writing these really detailed emails, which are almost a DIY step one do this step two do this, and then a good friend of mine George Goodrich actually said to me, ‘Man, why don’t you just release a book?’ and I realized, you know, that actually makes sense, I’ve got a lot of the material here. When I put the book out, I put it out on Gumroad – and there it is on the screen right there. I can’t believe how well-prepared you are. I love that. I’m just looking at my head floating around, it’s fantastic. And then, of course, after the book came out I wanted to keep doing more. I started getting out to various conferences and, we can talk about upcoming conferences later as well, and then of course creating the podcast and it’s just really grown from there, I mean, I’m loving it. I get to go out and meet a bunch of talented artists, and most importantly they’re prepared to put in the work, they’re ready to listen, they’re ready to do whatever they need to do, and so I’m very grateful and here I am today talking with you Ariel.
Ariel: So on that note, get ready to do the work, I want to break this interview down into three parts because, as we know, Spotify and streaming and playlisting is complicated. I organized Mike’s book in my head before I started talking to him, and so here’s how it’s going to go. Part one – I want to have you really take us through the basics of Spotify, and something that I realized, because we write a lot of marketing plans and long-term strategies for our artists, is the basics very often get skipped. People are so anxious to just get the music out that they choose a random Friday and they don’t really understand the foundations that need to happen on Spotify. So, could you kindly walk us through what to do before you hit the panic button?
Mike: Yeah look, and I make a really basic here for a minute which is fine because after that it’s going to get more complex and people may need to go back and replay this a few times, but look… firstly, let’s assume that you’ve got music. I sure hope that you do, whether you’ve released it or not. You need a distributor, you don’t need to sign to a record label, and we can get to the discussions for why you may or may not, but you use a distributor. So that could be someone like CD Baby or Distrokid, or whoever you choose, and they will take your music and put it to all of these platforms. They’ll make it available to purchase on Amazon, iTunes, so make it available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube music, the list goes on from here. Your music is scheduled to be released; what you can do is you can go to artists.spotify.com, and you can sign up. Now, some distributors will actually give you direct access so that you can basically bypass that process and go straight in and see your stats immediately, which is awesome, but worst case it usually takes a few days. Once you’ve done that, you go in and if you have that release – let’s say you have a release coming in the future, so it could be coming out in two weeks or four weeks time – the longer the better of course, and we’ll get to that. What you will do is you will see in Spotify for Artists on your dashboard, on the home screen, once you log in at the very top, it will say upcoming release. This usually happens one to two days after you’ve gone and put that song in with your distributor. You see upcoming release, you click on that, and there’ll be an option to submit it to the Spotify editorial team. Now, there’s two reasons why you want to do this. Number one, it will go to all of your followers, so if you have 500 followers, it’s gonna go into release radar for all of those followers. Another reason is you’re submitting it to the editorial team, these are people that work at Spotify, they curate the big playlists, the ones with followers in the millions and significant active listeners. As well, these are the people that you want listening to your music, and all you have to do is fill out this form, tag your music, and it’s very simple. It prompts you, so it will say ‘a male vocal, female vocal, mixed vocal, multiple vocalists, other vocals, heavy, soft, is it a happy song, a sad song, describe the mood or the setting – oh, it’s good for a coffee shop,’ and then it will also go as far as asking you about the instruments. So, if you play guitar, it will go as far as saying, well, what type of guitar? You know, it’s an electric guitar, its this random guitar that you picked up at the markets on the weekend and you don’t even know the name of it you have to google it. Whatever it is, you can add those instruments and everything in your song basically. So, once you’ve done this and you filled out the form, it’s gonna get to the right person in the right editorial team surface. An acoustic guitar track is more likely to get to the person who actually curates those playlists, instead of having it go to a team and they have to try and get through that list of 10-20 thousand songs that get released every single day now, you’ve actually put yourself to the top of the pile because you spent that time to tag your song correctly and get it in front of the right people.
Ariel: And, by the way, you were very generous in your ten and twenty. There’s actually a new a new tweet going around, thank you Cherie Hu, that says 40,000 assets are going up on Spotify every day. So, our advice is do not skip this part where you can put the maximum amount of tags in, because you really really want to make sure you give it your best shot to get to the Spotify editorial board. Okay, so what do you do after you’ve done that, Mike?
Mike: Well, you certainly don’t sit down on your hands and hope for the best, which is what some people do because they don’t know what to do next. So, you submit it, you should feel good about that – but that’s definitely not your work over. There’s a number of things that you can do after that, you can go ahead and create a pre-save campaign, where there’s numerous websites that will do it for you. There’s Show.co, here’s Toneden.io.
Ariel: Feature.fm is a third one we recommend. Just backup like one tiny bit because there was a part of your book that I really, really appreciated and loved, which was even before you go to put your music up on Spotify and all the other streaming services – understand this is a kind of a word that everyone uses often now – the zeitgeist. What’s in the zeitgeist of music playlisting these days is really understanding that people need to understand what you’re doing within a few seconds. So, if you have a 40 second intro to your song which has spoken word, or is weird, or you’re not getting to your point very quickly, Mike has a great tip which is separate the intro out and make a Spotify playlist for radio edit, and I love that advice. Do you want to add anything to that, like how many seconds before we get to the verse or the chorus or the lyric or the voice?
Mike: Of course. So, to let you know the reason that I – I don’t want to say discovered this, because I’m sure people have been doing this for a long time – but, when I released the debut album with my group Date Night, and I feel like I’ve said the name a lot it’s not a shameless plug it’s just that that’s where a lot of my learnings come from is by actually doing this stuff. We put out our album, and before we went to release it, I listened to it. I realize five or six of these songs have these long intros at the start, interludes if you will, where we’re just jamming away playing some strings, what have you. So, I said, well, these are too beautiful to take out and for people that listen to the album start to finish, they’re really going to enjoy this. But, if you put this song in a playlist with this for 40 long – 45, excuse me – 45 second long intro, people are going to tune out and lose interest and go to the next track. So, I said, why don’t we separate it into another track? So, what happens is the album track 2 is an interlude, the next track is the actual song. So, the best thing that can happen is people can listen to the interlude followed by the song, and that’s two streams because they’re treated as two separate tracks. The worst thing that can happen is they skip it and go straight to the song and the other part of this is when people put their songs in the playlists, they’re looking for songs that get to the point pretty quickly because they know that people will lose interest in that song and, in turn, lose interest in that playlist and go somewhere else. So, that’s why we made sure that the songs when they started it was very playlist-friendly, there was no roll over from the previous track that wouldn’t make sense, there was no talking at the end of the song or anything like that, and that really worked in our favor as far as placement as well because there’s no way that Spotify can come back to you and say, ‘hey, we really like your song, but can you cut out that minute of talking at the end we can put it in this playlist?’ No one’s going to do that, no one’s going to come to you and ask you to change that, because that was your creative decision.
Ariel: And again, for those of you that are sitting here rolling your eyes at us, this is not about compromising your artistic integrity, this is just about if you want to play the game. Hate the game, not the player, right? So, this is about if you do want to be viable in Spotify playlists, this is a suggestion. So, moving on. We were talking about pre-saving and the necessity of creating a pre-save campaign. So, Toneden, we talked about feature.fm, and then for the CD Babies out there, Show.co is their platform. Tell us about a pre-save campaign, what are we doing?
Mike: Sure! So, the way that I describe it is – it’s similar to CDs, remember CDs back in the day? You would going to your record store, your music store, and you would pre-order a CD, an album that was coming out in two weeks time – you would put your name down, and that way you would be guaranteed. You would go in there on release day and you would pick it up, you would have it, you could listen. That translated into pre-saves or pre-orders online, as well. So what you’ve got in Spotify and Apple music, there’s pre-saves and pre-ads. What basically means is on release day that song is going to be saved and stored into your library, so it’s immediately there on release day. If you set your library to automatically save offline so that you can listen when you’re going for a run where you don’t have any data or things like that, song is just there stored in your device, you can listen to it and you’re set. So what people are doing is running these campaigns and encouraging their fans and their followers to go and pre-save their song or their album, but what else is happening in that process is they’re also capturing you as a follower. So that way, even if you miss the fact that you save that release into your library, you’re still going to hit their Release Radar, and it’s also going to keep you as a follower long term as well, of course. Other things that they’re starting to do in these is they’ll actually ask you for your email address as well, and then they’ve captured you in that way. So, even if that person decides to start using a new streaming service in the future, or they take a break from streaming services in general, you’ve got their email, you’ve got another way that you can reach them, you can start to get more information about who that person is, perhaps, where they’re based so that you could start targeting email campaigns to them if you’re performing in this city. So, really, capturing a bunch of information there.
Ariel: Another word for this is gating, and if you study any type of marketing platform you will hear this, and you can get anything. You can you can get a music video, for example, using Show.co, or any of these platforms, and it basically means that on the day the video is released or in a pre-roll, before that, few days leading up to it, ‘Please come and check out my video, you have to subscribe to the channel to do so,’ so you’re putting a little gateway between you and your fans to take an action. But talking about pre-sales, I actually today got a text from one of my favorite artists and clients here at Cyber PR and it was wonderful. He just sent a little text saying ‘I have a new release tomorrow, would you mind saving?’ It’s so simple, there’s a little graphic of what it looks like, and it took me three seconds – I just pressed the link right from my mobile phone. I guarantee you that Eli Lev is spending most of today texting everyone he knows because that’s the kind of artist he is – so this is a great way, and you can do this on email. Mike talks a lot in the book about how to promote pre-sales across your social channels. Of course you want to put it on Facebook and make a tile and put it on Instagram and add it to a story and it is your job to get the maximum amount of people pre-saving, which I guess you’ve just explained. Also, it means following. So a pre-save also equals a follow for the next iteration of your next track, is that right?
Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. So, you’ve captured them ongoing as well.
Ariel: So, that’s great. So, every single that you put out is an opportunity to get people to come and follow – wundabar! Okay so Spotify basics – so we’ve got pre-save, we’ve got follow. I do notice a lot of times people don’t take the maximum amount of bio real estate, and they don’t put a lot of photographs or links. I would highly encourage you that while you’re setting up your Spotify profile, even go back make sure you have attractive photos. I think you’re allowed to put five or six photos.
Mike: It’s actually in the hundreds now
Ariel: Okay, so, put a minimum of a hundred photos – no, put a lot of photos. Think about it, look at your Instagram, the selfies that are performing well, album artwork, you performing – go and curate some photos because you have to remember a lot of times people that are finding you on Spotify might not actually know who you are, they don’t know about your Instagram feed, they might not get to your website. It is a great way of taking them on what us nerdy marketers call a customer journey. So, if I only know you through the Spotify portal, and I click on a song that I like, and then I click over and there’s like one snarky sentence like, ‘I make music,’ that is not taking me on a journey. That’s just you being too cool for school – don’t do it. Say where you’re from, put use the entire space, put a good bio in there. Don’t make it like a typical music industry boring bio. Do something fun – again, take your fan or your potential fan on a journey. And then of course Spotify also allows you to put your Facebook and your Instagram link, so you want to make sure that’s filled out in the profile. So, part two of this – is there anything else you want to say about Spotify basics, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m glad you mentioned social media because when I find a song by an artist I like on Spotify, I go immediately to their profile and hit follow, and then I go to about and I look for opportunities where I can help them, because I’m a fan, so I’m invested in that artist now, I care about them. But also I will click and I will do exactly what you said, I’ll click on their Twitter and their Instagram, see a little bit more about what they’re about, and also follow them there as well. But what’s important is, check those links, make sure they’re correct, because otherwise you’re sending people nowhere. When you upload those photos, you’re not just uploading them to show off a little more of your personality or your fashion sense or what you look like when you perform on stage, you’re also giving Spotify a permission to use those images in marketing, and so what that looks like is from time to time Spotify will send out emails to people that follow you saying that you’ve got a new song in Release Radar today, and there’s a photo of you that they’ve used that you’ve uploaded and given them permission to use.
Mike: Additionally, they send out emails to followers based on their city, saying upcoming shows in your city and there’ll be a photo of you performing and there’ll be a link so you buy tickets, and a link to listen to your music on Spotify. Another thing about the bio is you can actually tag artists, songs, playlists, and albums within your bio when you’re typing it out in Spotify for Artists. You just do the little app tag and then you start typing an artist name, or a song name, and of course if the search results are really long – it’s a really common name – you can actually do the little app and then paste the URL and it will make sure that it links correctly to the right artist in your bio. I always encourage people, I say give love to other artists. If you’ve collaborated with somebody, remixed them, performed alongside them, whatever it is – give them some love in your bio as well and tag them. I use it in my bio, I direct people to my originals playlist which has every original song that’s been created, which is another thing for every artist out there. If you don’t have a playlist of all of the music that you’ve created, make one now, because if people discover you and go to that playlist and hit play, they’re gonna listen to your entire catalogue instead of just one song and you control the order they listen in. So you get to put your strongest songs up top. And I’ve even used that to start building the structure for an album, releasing individual songs one song after the other putting it in this playlist and changing the order to see what feels the best and getting feedback from people. So when the album comes out they go, ‘yeah, this feels good, I really like the order of this.’
Ariel: That’s great, it’s like crowdsourcing with your fans. This is the perfect part two, which is all about creating playlists. Before we even get to getting on playlist, which is a whole part three. And we don’t have much time so we’re gonna speed through this, but Mike does spend quite a bit of time in the book – which you need to buy, and there will be a link in the show notes where you can buy it through me and I get paid, thank you Mike. But what we’re gonna do here is talk about the importance of curating your own playlist, not only with your own music. I love- one of the things that you recommended artists do was curate playlists including other indie artists in your genre or from your hometown or in a theme that makes sense, and then you can begin to swap playlists with those other artists. Can you take us through this a little bit?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So, when you’re starting out creating a playlist, if you add a major artist they’re not necessarily going to be excited enough to start posting it on social media and talking about you. That’s no disrespect to your curation or your playlist, it’s just that they can only do so many shoutouts per day. If you go to local artists, whether it’s friends or just people that you’ve seen perform and they fit within your genre and they’ll fit within your playlist that you’ve curated – it’s one thing to add them, but you need to tell them that you’ve done it. They may not discover that, not all of these artists are active on Spotify for Artists or other services out there like Chartmetric or Spot On Track. So, they’re not actively watching to see who’s adding them to these playlists. So, tell them. You know, it could be as simple as a tweet and tag them, just make sure they’re actually active on Twitter first, or a DM on Instagram, or an email if you have their email address, and then I just simply tell them. Most of the time they’re so stoked that they come back and they just want to do a shout out and they want to tell people. As far as you know, it could even be the first playlist that they’ve ever been added to. I’ve had that happen a few times and it’s mind-blowing. It’s the best feeling to know that I added a song because I loved it, and it was the first playlist some had ever been added to.
Ariel: And it’s also a really wonderful way of building a tribe for yourself, I mean artists always come to me and they’re like, ‘well, how do I open for a band – a big band, how do I?’ It’s like, well, who are you already playing with? What little tribe or medium tribe are large tribe are you already running in? We see the big superstar artists like the hip hop artists and pop artists doing all these collabs – think about your own little brand of collab, and a simple way to do it is just like this – add an artist that you really like and, you know, not Lady Gaga, but let go down a hundred steps into someone that’s maybe a year or two ahead of where you would like to be. This is a fantastic idea, and so the idea here is to get everyone in the community that’s included on these playlists that you’ve curated and thought out sharing and retweeting and posting on the different social channels. Very cool, okay. So, that’s playlisting. How many playlists should one artist have on Spotify? I seem to feel like I read conflicting information about this.
Mike: Well, the way I put it is- unless you’re trying to become known as a curator, then I would keep it minimal. So, yes, the artists playlist with all of your original music is essential, and yes, one other playlist where you add songs that are from artists that have a similar sound to you or similar vibe or they inspire you. Outside of that, there’s no real expectation to create more playlists unless you want to. So, what I’ve seen artists do is they might create a playlist of their live set, and so what that could mean is, ‘here’s what I played at my show this week,’ so then everyone can go online and listen to those songs. You know, they didn’t necessarily go and record the set and upload it or anything like that, but all of those songs were already released so they just put it in a separate playlist and then that playlist they may change whenever they have other shows coming up, and then they use that as a way to promote what they’re going to play at their shows and interact with their fans and get feedback about, ‘hey, this is what we’re playing in the live show, how do you feel about this, is there anything we should add, anything we should swap out?’ But, outside of that, I mean, if you want to create more playlists by all means, but only if you actually enjoying doing it. I feel once you’ve got those essential playlists, you’re good, you can go back to creating music and then just go back and check in on your playlists every now and then. I mean, the originals playlist you just need to drag a new track and whenever it’s live and the other playlists if you keep it manageable, I always suggest anywhere between 40 to 100 songs. 40 is roughly 2 to 3 hours long, and that’s long enough for people to get in, get hooked, and enjoy it, and potentially want more. 100 if you just can’t get that number down that’s fine, but just keep the curation tight. Actually, I always suggest listening to the playlist on shuffle as well from start to finish because you want to make sure that the experience is great for the listener no matter how they listen to that. And, of course, if they’re not on the premium subscription of Spotify it’s probably going to be shuffling it for them anyway, so just see how your playlist sounds by putting it on shuffle, and you may realize there’s actually a few songs in there that sound really out of place, and then you may decide- you may make the creative decision just to pull those out.
Ariel: Or switch them out. Same artist, different track.
Mike: Exactly.
Ariel: Okay, part 3. How the hell do I get on playlist, Mike? How do- I mean, you’ve already talked of course about Spotify curators. But, of course, there is a huge trend in the industry at this very moment. We’ve all been told that playlists are the new radio, and playlists are gonna save the industry, and playlists are the only way you’re gonna make money, and I think there is a little bit of anxiety around getting included on the maximum amount of playlists. So, should I just go to Google, ‘get me on playlists,’ and hire the first company that pops up?
Mike: Definitely not without doing your research first. You know, everyone now, it’s gotten to the point where they’ve realized, ‘okay, I can game this system, I can take money from people and give something in return,’ but it’s not necessarily good. What we mean by that is you go and you pay somebody let’s say five hundred dollars to promote your song or market it to playlist curators, and then what happens is two weeks later you look and you’re on five playlists and you’ve got ten monthly listeners and maybe fifteen streams. And you go, ‘okay, I don’t think anyone was actually listening to those two playlists and I am down five hundred dollars and this person has a gmail address and I can’t reach them anymore.’ So in saying that there are companies out there that do this and do a good job of it, there are people out there that actually doing some really good work. Of course, with anything in the industry they’re going to cost you a lot of money. I’m always careful to recommend anyone, because it can change so quickly. What I would suggest is do your research, and what that means is if they only have a gmail address or a hotmail address.
Ariel: Or their name is not on the website or they say something like, ‘we’re industry veterans!’ Really, are you? Are you sure? Do your homework. Google will tell you so much, and also, for any of you that are in Facebook groups or forums where for my ladies that are in women in music, just posting and on the group and saying, ‘hey, has anyone heard of this company? Can you please share with me off list what your experience is this?’ This is a great way of betting, and I know there’s there’s also a kind of a gray area and I have seen in my research companies that are like guaranteeing X amount of plays. Don’t do this. Don’t. This is very, very bad, and the reason why is they’re gaming the system somehow. These are not real plays, just sort of like when you pay for fake Facebook fans – they’re not real fans, we all know that, right? It’s 2019, we know that. So, please do stay away from that. Resist the urge. I know when you see that negative a thousand next to your newly posted song it’s painful, but read Mike’s book. I think you’re really gonna get some great insight on how to get real numbers on Spotify, which is what we want you to do. So in our pre-call I said I was gonna ask you one question, but we’re way too deep into this interview to do that. I do have one question I would love if we could part with, and that is, what should an indie artist who only has about one hour a week to dedicate to Spotify and playlisting in general do with that one hour?
Mike: Okay, one hour a week. Look, the most important thing that you can do is submit to editorial, because that is gonna at least guarantee you a playlist. If you have one follower, you’re going on to their release radar. You’re on one playlist that takes five minutes. With the other 55 minutes, I would suggest going online and doing a few posts. You’ve already got some followers out there, you’ve got friends, you’ve got fans. Let them know, and some of them may even do a little work for you and share it. If you’ve still got some time left after that, of course, there is more that you can do. There’s services out there where you can go and submit your songs to curators for a few dollars, so shout out to Submithub. You know, obviously, results may vary based on the song, based on the time of day, based on the curators, but, you know, you can submit for free on that, and some of them you can pay two dollars, five dollars, to get them to listen within 48 hours, and at least give you some feedback. There are other services out there that cost more, but if you’re new and you haven’t necessarily started making money from streaming yet, I wouldn’t suggest going out taking out a loan, getting a credit card and using these services. I always look at it and I go, ‘I’m willing to take a risk when I try one of these services.’ One of the legit services, I should mention. So, I would say once you started to make some revenue from streaming, put it aside and then use a portion of that and invest it into marketing. But until then I wouldn’t suggest going and spending $500 or $1,000 trying one of these services. Make sure that you do your research. Once again, I can’t say that enough. Don’t go looking at someone who doesn’t give you their details. Go on LinkedIn, Facebook, start asking people. Surely, you’ve got at least one mutual contact if you know anyone in this industry, and just start asking before you actually give them any money.
Ariel: Fabuloso, thank you so much. I would say, take 20 minutes a week, read the book. Links will be all over this blog post, everything that Mike has mentioned so generously, plus a link to his book plus, a link to some of my how-to articles on how to run a Spotify pre-sale, etc. Thank you so much for your time today, I deeply appreciate all of your insight and helping to fight the fight for all indie artists out there. We are delighted to have you in our tribe.
Ariel Loves the challenges that today’s music business presents and she leads her team to help clients come out ahead- whether that is with a detailed Total Tuneup, a new brand, or an increased established digital footprint, she is dedicated to helping her clients leave more educated than they were when they came to Cyber PR. She has written over 300 blog posts and four books on marketing, crowdfunding, and social media for artists- two of which went to #1 on Amazon. Ariel has spoken to over 100,000 artists in 12 countries about how to take control of their own marketing leading masterclasses, workshops, and panels.
It IS gold! I agree!