 Hey everybody what's going on it's ya man Kory, welcome to the Digital Dash where I'll be giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now for those of you who don't know who I am, I'm a Digital Marketer myself. I specialize in helping artists like you guys get their songs heard through platforms like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube and a bunch of others. Now what I want to talk to you guys about today is bots. More specifically bot playlists on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. I want to tell you guys what exactly they are, why they should be avoided and how you can go about telling if you're dealing with a bot playlist and a curator who's pretty much trying to finish you. Now what are bots? They're pretty much computer programs that are set to automate certain small tasks that people pretty much don't want to do themselves. If you've ever talked to someone about doing an Instagram campaign, whether it be like the follow on follow methods to grow your profile or setting up something like automatic comments and automatic likes, they were pretty much talking about using bot programs to do so. Now, in the playlisting world, it's pretty much a fake listener that's set to stream a song over and over driving up revenue for their artists in theory. Now I know some of you might be asking, but Corey, why would I not want to use that? Something that automatically drives us strings for me that sounds like exactly what I need. Now this may sound like something that you want to do, but trust me guys if Spotify finds out about it, they will violate you. Now about a year ago, Spotify was involved in a scam that pretty much left the company embarrassed. Some guys set up a bunch of fake playlists with fake songs by fake artists. He then went out and bought a bunch of Spotify accounts and automated them to keep listening to these songs over and over and over. He pretty much ran up about a million dollar check on Spotify, scamming them out of the money officially. If you want to check out the whole story, I'll make sure to leave the link to that in the description below. But ever since then, Spotify has definitely not rocked on anyone that they catch using bot playlists. I've heard horror stories from countless artists who've used these bot playlists and Spotify took their entire accounts down, even the songs that had legit plays on them. Now if you're somebody that's already been caught up by a bot playlist, don't switch yourself over to guys. Trust me, it happens to the best of us. Even I got finessed by a bot playlist very early on when I first started doing this. Luckily the whole situation turned out well for me. But I'm sure you're wondering how can you go about telling if you're dealing with the bot playlist and long story short, there is no concrete way to tell until you're already caught up in the system. But there are things that you can do to make it a little less likely that you get caught up by these bot playlists. Now, one of the first things that I would do is just straight up ask the curator, ask them where are their plays coming from for this playlist? Are you using ads? Do you have an Instagram page that you're using to promote this page? Are you getting shout outs from bigger influencers and bigger pages driving traffic back to the playlist? What are you doing to get people to this playlist? If they're not answering, there could be a sketchy sign in itself. But if you choose to move forward with it anyway, then ask other artists that have been in the playlist. Scroll through the playlist, find an artist that's accessible, hit them up on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or something and ask them, Hey, is this playlist worth it? Would you do it again? Do you notice anything sketchy from your analytics from which you can see from already being in the playlist? Most artists will be more than glad to help another artist not get scammed if they were already caught up in the scam themselves. So guys, sometimes you just got to ask. Now, another thing that you want to do is to avoid any strong unlikely promises. For example, I had a playlist curator reach out to me and tell me that he could guarantee 10,000 streams on a song for $10. Now guys, I'm here to tell you that that is a very unlikely scenario. Most of the times the playlist that would drive that amount of streams to a song would definitely charge way more than $10 to be on that playlist. So pretty much if it seems like it's too good to be true, it probably is. Now, if you're already in the playlist and you're trying to figure out if you're in a bot playlist or not, the best advice that I can give you is to pay close attention to your analytics. If things seem to be matching up a little bit too well, for example, you have a thousand monthly listeners out of it and you have a thousand streams exactly that came from it, then it's more than likely that you're dealing with the bot playlist. Like I said, just pay close attention to your analytics and look for anything that may seem unnatural. So I once heard somebody say that the best way to scan somebody is to appeal to their laziness. So pretty much guys, what I want you to take away from this video is to pay attention and be aware. Don't fall for anything that sounds like it's too good to be true because chances are it probably is. If someone seems like they're offering you a shortcut, don't take it because I promise you you'll regret it in the end. Then what's always guys, if you feel like you're learning anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I will once you guys are missing anything. Once again, my name is Cory and I'll see y'all next time.