 We've helped artists get billions of streams on Spotify, but the platform has changed over the years and not enough people are talking about how you should look at it today. So in this video, I'm going to go over the three areas that artists ask me about. I'm going to give you the sobering truth as someone who has helped multiple artists grow and has the benefit of connections to some of these platforms. But also, I'm going to end the video by telling you why I believe this is one of the best times ever for artists on Spotify. So here's the three areas that we're going to go through and it's worth watching through every single one of them because it's all going to connect. If you understand the market holistically like this, it'll be hard for you to get tricked by anybody who's offering a bad service and two for you to waste money on the wrong strategy for your Spotify streams. All right. So number one is bots. Number two is playlisting and number three is the Spotify tools. And I'll focus on one in particular, but let's start with bots. Many know who watched this channel that I'm not all opposed to bots. And I know most people are like, bots are so bad, bots are so bad, but let me give context because I feel like some people are actually taking my advice in the wrong way. So I want to be extremely clear by starting with this story. I'm talking with an artist probably last week. Yeah, it was last week and he's independent. He's early starting off and he signed some artists. Right. He signed other artists. This is an artist who signs some other artists and he's like, yeah, man, I was getting a decent amount of streams. I was doing like over $5,000 a month in revenue, but I got this check and when I got my check, it didn't account for all of my revenue. Spotify actually shorted me and immediately in my head, I'm like, oh, bots, bots, bots, but I don't know if he knows that bots might have been included in his streams. Right. I don't know what he's been doing. So I'm just listening. All right. And then he goes, yeah. So then I reported it to Spotify, basically trying to make it a case. And if I remember correctly, he even got a lawyer involved and he's making this case against Spotify. Spotify is basically like, nah, you know, we kind of gave you the right amount of money back and forth. And ultimately, he then hits his distributor. I'm not going to say the distributor's name because I actually think that they might have had some case. And I just don't want to put people's name out there like that. Right. But this is a real story. He hits the distributor. All of you would know it is one of the major distributors and they were like, we can't really do much about this because if we go against Spotify in this particular scenario, we're really going to risk tarnishing our relationship for all our other artists. And we can't just do this for this one random artist who you are. No offense. Sounds a little messed up, right? We're not going to do right by this one artist because it risked our relationship with all these other artists. Wrong. They were in the right based on hearing this scenario because Buddy was using bots. And Spotify is basically like, yo, look, man, your guy is using bots. You can try to stand up for him if you want to, but you know, it's against our policy. So that was really just the distributor being nice. Right. And then guess what? He gets kicked off of that distributor. He get all his accounts gets closed. He ends up on another distributor and you know what happened on that other distributor? He got kicked off that other distributor. I think he ends up getting kicked off maybe three distributors by the time we're done with this conversation and, you know, kind of stop it and like, all right, bruh, I heard enough. Ultimately, he's using bots and he becomes very open about it. And here we are today speaking about another strategy that he then again wants to spend like 20 K on bots. And I have to tell him, bruh, no, why are you trying to use bots? Still, I think he just told me about two years of struggle because of this. So this is where we get to the reality of the situation. Because I just started with, yo, I'm not all the way against bots. Let me make it extremely clear. I thought I've said this very clearly. Bots make sense for a very specific set of people. Right. Number one are people who are major label artists who already have a real fan base. And then there's a couple of scenarios where they're tweaking, using bots to elevate their streams. But you know why they're doing this? They're not doing it to make it seem like they have social proof. That bullshit that you hear people talk about, they're not doing it for social proof. They're also not doing it just to seem bigger than some other artists. In most cases, there's other incentives. There's the corporate structure of the music industry where you can play the games. The same reason I'll just leave it at this because I don't want to spend forever on bots in this video, but the same reason that artists will finesse and do things like bundles that account for more sales to have a higher ranking on the charts is similar to many of the reasons that they would do things like fake streams, even though they have a huge legitimate audience. I'll just leave that at that, right? Go to our other videos where we really go deeper into bots. I'll link it in the pinned comments in the description, something like that. All right, here's another thing about bots for those of you who want to do bots, because here's the other type of person who bots kind of make sense for it. If you are just a hustler and you aren't a real artist, if you've basically thrown in the towel and said, hey, I'm never going to be a real artist. I don't want to focus on doing a real fan base. OK, I just want to try to get some streams and make my money back for those streams. There's better hustles in the world. But cool, bots can make sense for you. But if you are a real artist, you want to actually get a real fan base and you are independent or more, I don't even want to say independent because that's actually wrong. There's independent artists who actually do make sense and are using bots. And it makes sense within the consciousness of what they're doing. Can't tell you where they are. But that's not for me to speak on. So a better way of saying if you're an artist who doesn't have a real strong fan base, it makes zero sense for you to use bots. All right, cool. Very strong statement, very direct statement. If you are in that bucket, do not use bots. Here's the last thing that I want to add when it comes to using somebody for their services for bots. The real, the best bot people, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars per client per client. So if you aren't spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you probably aren't even working with the best bot people. Now, why would those bot people have clients that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bots? Because again, they're working with major artists, major artists. Here's another thing. The best bot people, the people who are really doing this, like for real, for real, you don't know who they are. You just don't. Why imagine this? If I'm a great bot person, well, I'm going to be working with the best of the best, right? I'm going to be working with these clients that are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per client. And if I'm a massive client, I'm going to be working with the best of the best bot people, right? Those two things would make sense. Why? One, from the client side, if I'm a major artist, a bigger client who has that kind of money, I want secrecy. I don't want my bot person to be out there in the world talking. I don't want my bot person to be someone who's just going to be in the street spreading my business because that puts me on front street. Yeah, you can have consumers speculate and people like, look, oh, this doesn't make sense. This person is probably using bots, but that actual bot person would never put that out there. Why? Because that validates any of the questioning. So me as a client, I wouldn't want that. And if I'm a bot person, right? I and I'm working with these type of people. Why would I ever put that relationship in jeopardy when I'm getting paid that type of money, right? And then comes working with smaller artists. Why would I work with smaller artists who have less to lose and are only going to have the budget to pay me only like a thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars? It doesn't make sense for me to even risk it. Because why would I put my client at risk? Why would I work with a client who could put me at risk, therefore putting my business and my clients at risk? And why would I waste time doing more work by working with thousands of artists when I can make the exact same money working with like 50 artists? None of it makes sense. So you should be able to add that up. If you don't fit the bucket of having a lot of money or already having a strong fan base or having really strong connections to someone who happens to be using bots. And these are the best of the best people. Then you probably don't even have access to the right people in the first place. You're not just going to be able to go on IG or Google bots people and then look it up and hey, here's my bot servers and have the right people. All right. That's everything I got to say on bots. Now let's get to number two. And this is extremely important as well. Playlisting today has finally found a realistic positioning. Right. There was all this hype on playlisting and now the dust is settled. Here's the reality of playlisting. Over time, there has never really been a huge argument for playlisting in terms of real fans, never not a huge considerable argument where that should be your primary strategy. Does it mean that there haven't been some playlists here, some playlists there that have made sense? But outside of a rap caviar, that's been the only playlist throughout Spotify's history where you could almost look at that playlist and say that playlist can break an artist. And then you had the second tier. The second tier were playlists that just happened to be quality and it happened to be the right artist. And the best case scenario was, hey, this is a R&B playlist, for instance. And I'm an R&B artist and it's actually organic. And if I can get on this R&B playlist, hopefully my music is actually strong enough where people hear it and then they repeat it. And then you trigger Spotify's organic algorithm. That's the ultimate goal up out of that. Right. That was the second tier. That second tier, it didn't really get as many results as you would expect. Right. You would get on the editorial playlist. We've worked with editorial playlists, been on plenty of editorial playlists. They are great placements. They're valuable. They we we appreciate them. Why? Because it's free marketing, right? They're free editorial quality playlist placement is free. But never have we really seen it as a massive impact on a campaign where we say this song went completely viral all because of editorial playlists. And most artists end up being disappointed at the impact of editorial playlists, which leads me to the fact that editorial playlists aren't even the power anymore. I'm going to give you a gem on that in a second. But let's go to the third level. So we got the cultural impact of a rap caviar playlist, pretty much one of one. Then we have the second level, which is editorial and some like third party that happened to have a moment of time, literally a moment in time that has some similar level of impact of editorials. And then everything below that, which is vast majority of the market has very little impact, probably built up by fake streams and mostly has a negative impact on your actual business because they're going to put you in this playlist. And then after you on this playlist, because it's all mixed up, you're going to mess up your related artist. What do I mean by that? If I get on a playlist and then now I'm on some random playlist, everybody who actually does listen to my music. These are real people in this particular case, but these people aren't the type of people that typically listen to my music and the type of artists that are related to me on my profile. I will be able to see what my related look like. And now I have a bunch of randos who make no sense for my music, meaning Spotify doesn't even correctly know how to place me within their algorithm. So I'm not going to even be put in front of people who could be my fans because I'm being compared to these artists that are not related to me. That's a huge impact of a lot of bad playlists. But now here comes the reality of it all. Spotify themselves have noticed that this whole play listing thing. It's not what we wanted to be when we started, right? We actually see better impact from release radar and Discover Weekly, those two playlists that don't have anything to do with meeting some magical person behind the scenes. And we've known some of these magical people have had connections to some of these magical people who are going to get me on this editorial playlist, right? These great people who actually are fans and really love music. Those play listing people are great. The ones who work at Spotify. But when they put you on there, you're not going to see that impact. And Spotify even started to see the impact is just not moving. And it's easier to scale the algorithmic playlists. So they saw more results in the algorithmic playlists. And you know what Spotify has been laying people off, right? A lot of it, they try to speak on as podcast related layoffs. But last November, they got a couple of playlist editors out of there as well. Some of people who had that influence. And that's what a lot of these big companies do. They'll do these big layoffs and then they'll throw in some other people that they don't want you to quite understand. And then they'll use that opportunity to lay off some other folks that have nothing to do with the primary narrative they're pushing. That way they don't scare people when they start questioning, well, how come you laid off all these people in the playlist in department? Or how come you laid off all these people in the XYZ? I'm just making something up right in that example, because once that arises, that leads to some other questions that need answers, right? But we know multiple people who had their playlisting person taken out of the game no longer as Spotify, because when you think about things like AI, if AI is becoming more and more of a thing, how valuable are these physical bodies? Do we really need that many people to be in charge of playlisting? When you think about Spotify, AI radio, I can't remember the name of it, the DJ or whatever. I can't think of the name right now. But that's another chip at the human capital of meeting a playlist. And this is where we get to number three and the most important of Spotify tools right now that is changing the game. And that is Discovery Mode. Discovery Mode is changing the game and people aren't saying it loud enough yet. So let's speak on that in the context of everything I just talked about in this video. I just had a client homie hit me saying, yo, Sean, we're at 50,000 daily streams on Spotify because of Discovery Mode. And he's not a new case. I've heard this story again and again of a massive boost in your streams and monthly listeners because of Discovery Mode. And why is this so important? What is Discovery Mode? Discovery Mode is something that you can have access to. Now, I know a lot of people are just hearing about it a little bit more, but we first heard about Discovery Mode probably a year and a half because of the conversations we've been able to hear about, right? But it wasn't for us to say back then and it was only it was super, super limited and went from internal Spotify, super selective. And then it became a few distributors had access. And now there's individual artists. When I say my client homie, I'm talking about their unsigned, completely independent, have no connections in the industry in that particular way. And, bam, they have access to Discovery Mode, massive boost in their streams because they said, hey, Spotify will collect 30 percent less off of our royalties. And in exchange for you taking that 30 percent from us, you are going to put us as one of the songs that becomes upnecks when people, you know, listen on Spotify, right? That's a pretty short and sweet way of saying what's going on with Discovery Mode, how it works. Great tool. Here's why it's so powerful. Yet again, this is way better. The results that I've seen from Discovery Mode is way better than anything I've ever seen from the editorial playlist. And you know what? You didn't have to talk to a person to get it done. You didn't have to play politics to get it done. You didn't have to have a distributor to get it done. So that takes the distributor's power right there, because many of these distributors, their lone power today was, hey, yeah, we can just do what DistroKid does and TuneCore does and put you on Apple Music, Spotify and all the other DSPs. But we also got playlisting connections. So that's why you're coming to us. You're coming to us to get that playlisting connection cloud because, you know, DistroKid, CD Baby, they're not going to do that for you. Well, hey, DistroKid artists have Discovery Mode. We'll get deeper into how you can get Discovery Mode in a second. But imagine that you don't have to do any politicking. You don't need any of those types of connections to have access to Discovery Mode. There are so many artists that we work with who are doing Discovery Mode and none of them have any label. They don't have a manager and many of them are using the typical distributors. That puts the power back in your hands, especially when it comes to Spotify far more than it ever has. But look at this. This is what I love about Discovery Mode. A lot of y'all have been talking about that music, right? The music is great. All this marketing, having to run ads, doing this content. All of that stuff is repulsive. I just want to spend time on my music and get that thing listened to. I get it, right? Or the beautiful thing about Discovery Mode is it's just the music. You put your music out there and people become fans of you strictly through the music. They're judging you strictly off the music. That's one of the best marketing tools out there when it comes to being an artist and marketing yourself as a artist. Specifically, your actual product. I don't know anyone better than that actually right now when I try to think of it. So Discovery Mode is a great opportunity for those artists who say, Hey, my music is the thing. I really can't do this content stuff. All right. And then you add the facts that you don't have to do any politicking to get access to it. That's great. It's a beautiful thing. But how do you get Discovery Mode? Let's be on that and then I'll give you my final strategy that you should be using to grow on Spotify going forward. All right, here's what Spotify says. You may be eligible for Discovery Mode. If your artist team meets all of the following requirements, you have at least three tracks that meet the track eligibility criteria below, which will go into that criteria. Secondly, you have at least 25,000 monthly listeners. We found that Discovery Mode works best with an audience of this size or above. And then thirdly, you have an active Spotify for artists team that's registered in one of the countries below Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, which is Australia or New Zealand, or South America. All right. So, you know, if you're in one of those countries, but let's go back up to you have at least three tracks that meet the track eligibility criteria below. What are those criteria? A track is eligible if a participating licensor is the distributor of the track, which is currently a muse. Are you using CD Baby, CMD Shift Dance All Day? I actually never heard of that one. DistroKid, EMU Bands, Stem, United Masters, Venice Music and Vidya. All right. Now look, some of these distributors are a little bit more relationship based in terms of getting access to them. But CD Baby, easy, United Masters, easy, DistroKid, easy. Those are all a layup to begin using. So if you want access to Discovery Mode and you don't have any of these, you can easily get access to CD Baby, DistroKid or United Masters. Secondly, the track has been released on Spotify for at least 30 days. And then thirdly, the track has been streamed in radio or autoplay in the last seven days. Now, keep in mind, this is still relatively new in terms of the amount of artists that have access to it and the criteria. So they'll probably be evolving this over time, right? Changing some of the criteria. Maybe they take something out, maybe they add something in, but it's not that hard. It's not that hard. Here's the thing you need to pay attention to, right? Twenty five thousand monthly listeners. Now let's get back to strategy because your distributor, whoever you use. Bam, easy, go check that box. The country that you're in, easy, check that box. You don't live in the right country, go move, whatever. But you can do that, right? That's very easy to be able to check that box. The hardest thing that is a part of this criteria is getting twenty five thousand monthly listeners. So what does this bring things back to? One, if you're using bots, they're not going to count those monthly listeners. They know what's up. You're not going to get the score of Discovery Mode for that. Two, play listing. You can try to hack your way to getting twenty five thousand monthly listeners with play listing. But again, you're probably risking having bots and not even knowing it. And again, let's go back to the guy at the beginning of this video. You got kicked off distributors. You don't want to put yourself in that type of relationship with the distributors. And now you got your name messed up. Nobody wants to work with you anymore because you've been on play lists that have been using bots or you've just been outright using bots. He was doing both because he thought he was being mindful, by the way, going under the radar based on Spotify's criteria they used to try to watch if you're using bots, but I'm not going to get into that. So what does this mean, though? If you need to have twenty five thousand monthly listeners, if you can get to at least twenty five thousand real monthly listeners, how will not be extremely powerful then to be able to use Discovery Mode to boost yourself up even more? Yes, that's one of the best things you can do for yourself right now. So let me walk you through my thought process and what we've been seeing artists do. One, we use the same methods, whether that's through content, whether that's through advertising, whether that's through influencers, the same typical methods that are tried and true and you don't hear people not talking about them anymore and they're still around because they actually work. They're not one of those trends people keep saying for a period of time and then they disappear. They're tried and true. They all work. And if you can at least get yourself to twenty five thousand monthly listeners and then follow the rest of the criteria as well, especially the individual track record criteria, that's the second tier in terms of these streams, right? But you follow that and at least get to that point. Once you're able to use Discovery Mode, you're going to get over another twenty thousand monthly listeners if you have solid product, right? They want to basically use this criteria to determine do you have a solid product or not. And then once you have a solid product, which is music, then it's no problem to be pushed out to the rest of the world, right? But they don't want to push bad music and mess up the Discovery Mode algorithm for everybody. So do great content. We've gotten hundreds of millions of streams literally just off of artists posting organic content using our methods or run ads. We've seen millions of streams come directly from ads. People triggering the algorithm, running ads and then influencer campaigns. Y'all know it. Influencers campaign can do to make a song go viral. Figure out how to get your streams up from that alone and get yourself in a position to be eligible for Discovery Mode. When you are eligible for Discovery Mode, then it should be hard for you to get under twenty five thousand monthly listeners again. Once you start activating that and if you stay consistent, that's it. All right. Get yourself in a position to be able to use Discovery Mode should be your strategy for Spotify specifically right now. Get yourself in a position and then use it if you think it makes sense. That's a whole another video in terms of why it might make sense numerically and how you should look at it as a long term strategy. I'll do that and put that here somewhere. Like we'll do a conversation about that. But I have not seen a better time on Spotify for artists that you can have direct access to the real shit without having connections. A huge amount of money worrying about fake stuff that's going to mess you up. Anyway, that's it for this video. Let me know your comments and thoughts in the comment section below. And if you want to see a video about something else, drop those comments as well. Peace.