 I talk to so many of you, and often times you're depressed since one song did well, then the next one's not doing so well, or it could be that your last song made release radar but this one isn't doing so well, or it could be that once you stop promoting your streams for the song, the streams plummet to single digits. But here's the thing, this is often happening because you're playing a game you don't understand the rules to, so allow me to explain them so you can stop guessing and do the work that will help you stop being so depressed about your music promotions. With this video, I'm gonna show you how you can make it more likely your song gets on release radar and discover weekly playlists and makes its way into the algorithm. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fanbase from 0 to 10,000 fans, and this is MuseFormation. So before I tell you all the actionable things you can do to get your song on release radar and discover weekly playlists or what many people call into the algorithm, let's take a second to understand what Spotify wants to see in your song to put it in the algorithm. Spotify wants to see one, that people play your song repeatedly, two, that they save it or playlisted, three, that they share it, and four, and most of all, that they don't skip it. So often times I hear from musicians that they aren't getting in release radar or discover weekly even though Spotify says on their website, if you have 100 followers you'll be in a 100 release radar playlist, if you have a thousand you'll be in a thousand release radar playlists, and so on. Here's the thing, I'm basically the one person on YouTube who does this thing, but I have this tracker so I can see every time Spotify changes their pages and that language got deleted because while that was something they sold their service to artists on for years, it seems that's not been the case for a while, and instead it comes down to the popularity index, and we'll get into what that is in a second, but you have to imagine with more than 60,000 songs uploaded a day to Spotify, how much of that was just total crap no one would want to listen to all the way through. So people's release radars and discover weeklies became filled with garbage, so instead of just guaranteeing that the song is going to make it into those algorithmic playlists which are really popular and listened to by a lot of the users, they've made a threshold to be able to get promoted on the platform and that is passing this popularity index. Now I know some of you are getting traumatized by this popularity index term because you're thinking of some mean girls movie type scenario where you're sitting alone in the cafeteria by yourself again and you can't sit with us. But that's not it, instead this is a way Spotify factors in all the things I listed before about how they judge your song and measures you against the rest of the platform and gives your song a score. Now I know a lot of you get super mad about robots judging your music, but I want to be clear this is not that instead it's a robot analyzing humans enthusiasm or lack thereof to your song, and with that I know a lot of you also get pissed off about that because you think somehow you can hack the system to get your trash songs into the algorithm. But I'm here to tell you the rules and I got bad news for you chief. The odds are against you getting a terrible song in but if you understand this game you could have a clear advantage on how to win it when your song is borderline. That is of course unless your song is total trash since the whole idea of this is to try to keep the playlist high quality. But the thing is often times great songs don't make it into the algorithm because the people who write them don't get what they need to do to get the song into the algorithm. Okay so let's talk about this popularity index thing. You're of course wondering what yours is so in order to find this I recommend using this free site called Musicstacks where some nice person was kind enough to go into Spotify's developer tools and show you all sorts of metadata about your song that you could search for their website including its tempo key and how loud Spotify perceives the song and well a whole lot more. There's other sites that will show this stuff too including Spotify's own developer tools but this is the easiest and free so let's use it. Okay so I do want to make this clear though. Everything that I've been saying throughout this video is all well researched and verified but here's where we got to get into some analysis since Spotify doesn't want to give away all the secret sauce. So between me and my crew of nerds we have access to about 150 to 200 artist analytics from the various Spotify for artist teams we're on and we've been watching things and discussing this a lot over the past few months. Now since we're cool in demand people we of course work with mostly artists who always get a high popularity index score on every song that gets them into the algorithm but occasionally some don't but what I've seen is this is usually when a song falls below around 23% on the popularity index. I've seen one or two fall as high as 27% and not get undiscovered weekly or release radar but that's an outlier. So my bet is this is a really genre dependent and how many songs are out each week for consideration but to between 25 to 30% gets you into the algorithm most of the time. To put things into perspective too I want you to understand how high these scores can be. The highest I've ever seen is a song that just about everybody who likes who's not a deranged sociopath which is outcast Hey Ya and I know I'm gonna regret saying that in the comments. Hey Ya has an 85% popularity score. Now since Spotify will never make anything easy I should also say on their site they do say that unless you submit your playlist pitch seven days in advance you may not make it into the algorithm. My guess is that it's because they want to figure out which buckets to put you in for analysis and make some gatekeeping so they don't have to consider every single song. So by now I know a lot of you have paused this video and checked your popularity score and some of you are really depressed but since I'm such an uplifting positive vibes type of guy I will tell you how to push that popularity score up. So let's first discuss your mantra here and this is the thought process that will get you to understand the work ahead. So since we rarely see any song get into the algorithm after the first two weeks of its release I mean I have seen it before around four weeks when somebody got a huge spike of traffic but that's really the only exception to the rule. So the name of the game in your first weeks of your song being out is this. Get your music in front of people who are most likely to listen repeatedly save and share it or even playlist it and most of all keep it away from people who are going to listen and think it's trash but you're of course wondering how do you do that. Well the first part is really easy since you want to have people stream your song that are likely to enjoy it you need to make sure your existing fans know about it since obviously no one will be more likely to stream it and share it than them and I know that sounds easy but so many of you messed that up. So many of you don't concentrate on getting fans emails or text messages and hanging them with the message as your song is released. Whether you're collecting emails and text numbers from offering unreleased material or just having it a tab in your link in bio which of course you could do with our friends at Koji if you email the fans who are most likely to rinse the song on repeat and share it you increase the chance your song is going to get a good popularity score and so many of you fail to retain and care about getting those emails and text numbers but using an email service to email and a service like Layla or Community to text the numbers you have that your song is out is crucial. I really like to email at midnight when the song drops and do the text message at 6 p.m. EST the next day as that seems to be the most effective for getting them read. Now of course social media posts and getting artists who are similar to you to post about it will also do this as their fans are likely to enjoy your music but one of the keys here is to obviously go hard on that promotion and early. You may have heard me also talk about that on release day you should really take the day off from anything else and text every musician in your contacts and tell them about your new song and catch up with them and ask them what they're up to and hopefully they'll end up sharing it too. But really so many of you don't even announce the song is out till days later or miss the crucial late night or early morning posts you could do. You need to acknowledge you're in a race to get people who are likely to enjoy the song before the window closes on you getting in the algorithm as well as constantly reminding them to keep re-upping their relationship with the song or if they miss the announcement making sure that they hear about it later on. If you have no clue what I'm talking about watch my 60 day plan to promote your song that's linked to the description as it lays all this out thoroughly and if you missed that video this is the reason you should be subscribed and get notified since this is what we talk about here but this does bring me to that having a bunch of unfamiliar ears on your song or if you're doing some ridiculous broad youtuber Facebook ad campaign where near random people are listening and potentially skipping the song well that disobeys the above rule and will probably mess you up on getting you in the algorithm but this does bring me to why your community work is so important if you don't know what I'm talking about with community work please go to the description and click on the link on how to find community since this is one of the most important concepts on how to find the early fans who are most likely to enjoy you and prop you up to build your fan base if you know the communities of your micro genre where people are enthusiastic to your type of music well that can increase your popularity index score and find you the fans who are most likely to enjoy you and spread the word about you but obviously what makes this tricky is we all want to get things like premieres on a website or even getting on playlists that are not editorial from Spotify since obviously many of the people who listen to those playlists or see those premieres skip the song so often but I actually think going for these opportunities is worth the risk since they can introduce you to so many new listeners and let's be honest if your song is trash it's not gonna matter if it hits the algorithm anyway since it's just gonna die in the algorithm anyway so we may as well try to get it some visibility in front of the right eyes and try to give it its day especially since hopefully these playlists are the type you fit in it on and the publications that do premieres should be doing them for your micro genre of music so inevitably people ask me about using services like submit hub and other playlist pushing type services but here's what I tell everybody about these services you need to be really specific about which ones you push for consideration on and only do it if you're like hell yeah my song belongs on this playlist if you really find a great fit on the playlist they're worth your money but I tend to find everybody who puts their song into consideration for just random playlists that they throw against the wall like it's spaghetti well they feel like they wasted money on these services but let's talk about the opposite of when you're in front of the ears that are most likely to enjoy your music so many times I talk with the musician they're like Jesse my neighbor is Addison Paul you know America's biggest influencer for vaginal jade egg tossing contest and she said she will share our song to her millions of hours and while that's wonderful has launched a lot of musicians careers having those famous influencers give you a share kids often backfire what we don't often hear about is this can be poison for the algorithm since Addison's fans love her well for her vaginal egg tossing but not necessarily her specific music taste and her fans can be metalheads EDM bros and Tweet Indie fans which is probably not the music you're making so when they listen you're gonna get a lot of skips now one way to harness Addison's influence is if you're following my 68 week CSP release plan and hit the links in the description if you don't know what that means well you could have her share it when the music video drops on week six since now you won't be disturbing the algorithm and you can still get the attention from Addison's egg heads what that's the name of her fans anyway let's remember Addison's fans may mess up the algorithm for you so it's best to wait and if you don't get that just remember I answer every question the comments below but truly the holy grail right now of driving this number up is promoting on tiktok and whether that's on your own tiktoks are doing tiktok influencer marketing this is really the gold here and this isn't just because tiktok is driving so many streams but the real magic sauce here is that people have to have some enthusiasm towards your song to literally go over to Spotify just stream it since odds are they aren't doing that unless the song is felt worth listening to it so this makes that promotion solid gold for driving the algorithm so I think it's largely useless to mention since you need to have pretty good engagement numbers are already on Spotify to be able to use it Spotify's marquee tool is of course great at getting your pre-existing fans to stream the song and I made a video on it recently which is linked in the description if you want to get to know how to do that but especially if you're on day three of promoting and you look at your popularity score and things aren't looking good the marquee tool can really help drive streams of people who are likely to like your song since it targets the people who have already listened to you on Spotify but truly when you're thinking about how to drive up your popularity score if things aren't going well during your promotions you need to think about how the pre-existing people who already like you are gonna listen to your song more and remind them to do so or find the people who are most likely to like your song by knowing your community okay on the song now is a video on how to blow up on Spotify since if you're watching this video you probably want to know please subscribe and get notified and thanks for watching