 It's the network. What's a fake playlist? So there are two. There are two really popular types. There are bot playlists and then there are ghost playlists. So bot playlists are just like the bot pages you see on Instagram is someone's created a computer program to generate streams on Spotify. It's usually really smart people who have figured out how to hack the API and shit. Both accounts are the result of someone who has just bought multiple Spotify accounts. Like someone who really just has a bunch of money that may go out and buy a thousand Spotify accounts and then just set those songs to contain some loop songs on a playlist. So it's like, you're getting these streams but these streams aren't being generated by real individual people. Spotify is a really bad problem about that which that's kind of what comes into the world user-generated playlist thing is that, like I said, it's a big problem and there's nothing that can really warn you about the playlist until you're done. So this is a story I haven't shared a lot but it happened to me recently, maybe like a month and a half ago. I was in New York and while I was in New York I just was having a conversation with this guy who's kind of been doing the same thing I do for just like a longer period of time and we're chopping it up. He's like, yeah man, you know, what playlist have you been working with? And I tell him about like one of my like smoking guns. It's like one of my players is like, I found this place like a couple of months ago always like beautiful for me. Like just, I never had a complaint with it. And he tells me, he's like, oh yeah man, you shouldn't use that playlist anymore. I'm like, what? He's like, those guys are known in the industry as like those are ghost players like that. It's a ghost player. It's like the guy just buys a bunch of accounts. He's like, have you ever seen anything weird with any of the people you put in it? Tell him like, no, you know, I've never seen anything crazy. Literally the very next day, something wild happened on that place where like the traffic from it just like dropped dramatically. So I literally saw what he was talking about just in that very next day. Like, okay, I see what you're saying. This is a sketchy playlist. So just, I've kind of personally gotten to the place where I have maybe about like eight to 10 playlists I work with consistently. And that's because the curators either have shown me where the traffic comes from or the players are attached to something that's the way I'm pretty confident in the traffic, meaning that they're attached to an influencer. So I know that the followers here are probably because they follow the influencer or it's attached to an Instagram page or they're running ads for it and they're showing me the ad traffic for it. Or, you know, they're doing, I just met this woman recently who they're really big into running like interstitial ads like these different types of ads to push traffic to the playlist. So that's one of the main things when you're just reaching out to these curators is ask them how they're generating traffic to the playlist. I won't tell you, don't work with them. Like a player's curator that is legit would gladly show you what he needs to show you to convince you to spend your money, right? Like if you're coming to me and you're willing to be a customer and you just want a little bit more information, if I'm legit, I should be more than willing to show you the information. Like unless it's just something like top secret where it's like, no, you're still in like the juice with it. But most of the time it's like, yo, how you bringing traffic to these players? I'm running Facebook ads. Can I see, like, can I see one as a screenshot or how are you pushing traffic? Oh, I pay for social media shots. Here's one I did recently or I'm an influencer twice a week. I push my followers out to my playlist. Like you always want to figure out where the traffic is coming from. And that's really just the best way that you can avoid those types of playlists before you get into it. And then once you're in a playlist, you should just be looking for that red flag. So look for abnormal dips in the traffic, meaning that if this playlist has been getting you 7,000 streams a day for two weeks, and then on the 15th day, it drops to 30 streams a day. You know, it's kind of like, which I've seen that before. That's literally what happened with this playlist. Like it was doing like about 5,000 streams a day. I know where it dropped to like 180 streams for one day. The very next day it went back to the exact number, which is sketch. It's like, playlists have dips in traffic, but it's usually not that drastic. Like it may be like a, like anywhere from like a 10 to 25% difference over like a week, because of like, you know, people don't listen to the same plays all day every day. But it's really just about like looking for like those red flags, like any drastic changes in traffic, anything that's kind of like too close together. So like one of the big red flags, which a lot of them have kind of gotten around it, but it's like if the listener count and the stream count match like exactly. So like if you have 5,000 listeners and 5,000 streamers, most playlists who have like actual fans, the people are listening through their playlists a couple of times. So you usually end up having like less listeners and streams most of the time. Because like I said, it's people who are coming back listening to the song like over and over, or the playlists like over and over again. But yeah, man. So that's just been like a really big problem in it. Personally, what I'm starting to do, like on my end is transitioning into using like pay advertising and just like third and like influence the shout-outs to drop traffic to Spotify. That's one of the things I've seen like a little bit, a little bit better of like results with. It's not as immediate as the playlist thing, but it's one of the things where it's like, if I'm pushing traffic to your Spotify using Facebook ads, at least I know the traffic is legit because Facebook ads and Google ads aren't going to sell me, you know, fake traffic. Whereas a curator on Spotify would gladly sell you fake traffic if that's the thing that you sent in. All right. But a lot of it man, a lot of it man's going to come out to the more you pitch yourself to playlists, the more you just start to see it, you'll be able to easily like spot those red flags. And you'll be able to like, you'll be able to fill out sketchy behavior from the curators, which like even one thing I noticed is like, if a curator doesn't listen to the song. So what I do with curators when I'm emailing them is I use this website called Banana Tag. So what Banana Tag does is it allows you to track who opens your emails and who clicks your links. So I have it installed in my Gmail. So when I send emails out to curators, I can see when they open it and if they click on the link. So if they open my email, let's say, like I said, my email is usually like, hey, my name is Corey, I'm reaching out on behalf of Blah Blah Blah to submit his or her song to your playlist. I think the fans who come to your playlist for Travis Scott and Trippy Red will really enjoy the song. You know, I'll link you to it below. Check it out, let me know what you think and what we need to do to move forward with a placement. If I get a response to that email and say, hey, we love the song. You know, I think we can work with it. Here are our prices, but I can see that they didn't even click the link. That already lets me know, like, all right, something weird, like you're just taking money from whoever can submit to it. You're not really having some kind of like filtration process here. Which usually those type of people, most of the times those people are the ones doing a sketchy behavior because they just want to make, they don't care. It's not legit or whatever they're doing anyway. The playlist isn't worth it anyway. So they just kind of want the money. That's always like one of the first things I look at. Like I said, like, would they tell you where the traffic is coming from? Would they show you, would they share with you just some type of information that kind of proves that, that type of stuff? Will you still go ahead with that? If they, you know, hey, we love you, but we didn't click the link, would you still go through it like that? I have before and not always, but usually those are the playlist that end up doing the worst for me. Because like I said, like, there's no, it means they don't have like a filtering process. Or it's like, if I have a platform and I accept everything that comes through the platform, it makes a position in that platform really valuable. But like I said, from my experience, those playlist usually tend to be like lower traffic playlist or they're doing something that's sketchy. Like there's something about it just isn't something that you want to be a part of. So I was just like I said, I'm in a position where I'm using like the same playlist that I'm like comfortable with. And so I kind of figure out a way to just figure out what other playlists in my network are ones I shouldn't be working with. Like figure out a better system to kind of like figure all that stuff out. I just really rotate like the same, like eight to 12 playlists. Like when people work with me, like, cause I trust their traffic, I trust what they're doing. They've given me the information. But yeah, a lot of that stuff is it really does just come down to like asking the right questions.