 So these past couple of weeks, me and Shana put out a good amount of videos talking about Spotify, from how to find Spotify playlist, why Spotify isn't necessarily the most successful thing, tools that you can use to find Spotify playlist. And the one common question that has come up under all of those videos is how do I know if the playlist are fake? How can I tell if I'm placing myself in a body playlist or a fake playlist and how can I protect myself from the great Spotify purge that seems to happen every other year or so? So that's exactly what this video is going to be about, how you can audit Spotify playlist to make sure you're getting the best quality playlist possible. Let's get into it. What's going on? My name is Colby music marketer and co-founder country brand agency. And today what I want to talk to you about is how you can audit Spotify playlist. Now I can't deny it. You know, I personally don't really like using Spotify playlist. I have my qualms, you know what I'm saying? I have my issues with them, but I can't knock that in the right hands and in the right playlist. They can be an effective way to boost your streams and put yourself in front of a relevant audience. Now the problem that has arisen with the whole playlist industry is that there are a lot of people who see it as an easy lick off for artists. They go create body playlist and scam you with fake streams or even worse. They go create playlist that have fake followers and you don't get any streams at all. But you just see this place with like a huge number on it and it sucks. You know what I'm saying? It really sucks to pay your money for this playlist just to find out that the listeners aren't real or that there are no listeners and that you know, you basically ought to start shit all over again. I've been there. Other markets been there. You guys are not alone. Trust me. So I have developed an audit method to give me a certain level of peace of mind to know if a playlist is fake or not. Now I'm going to just go ahead and preface it. There is no 100% way to tell if a playlist is fake or not. There is no tools. There's no software. Spotify will not open up. It's API enough for people to be able to build things to be able to tell. So right now the things I'm going to talk about are really mostly based off of gut decision and a couple of analysts that you can look at to help strengthen their gut decision. But at the end of the day, you really won't know until you get into the place and see a couple of back end things. So I just had to put it out there. But before we get into all that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all that good stuff. Now that they've been said, let's go ahead and get into it. All right, cool. So let's break down the scenario, right? You found your playlist. Maybe you use one of the tools I talked about, one of the methods that we talked about finding playlist or the find playlist, and you have a good list of playlists that you think might be a good fit, right? You like the way they look. You like the list, the curation of it, and you think that you make sense for it. But now you want to make sure that these playlists are actually actually legit, right? So what can you do to run this playlist through an audit process? So the first thing that I tend to do is to ask the curator for proof of marketing for the playlist or how they're growing the playlist. Like I'll blatantly ask them like, Hey, how are you growing the playlist? Are you running ads? Are you using influencers to shout it out? Are you posting about it on an Instagram account? Like, what are you doing to grow this playlist? And if they tell me I'm running ads, I'm using influencers, I'm doing whatever, I immediately ask them for proof. I say, Hey, can I see a screenshot of your ad? Or can I see one of the influencer posts? Or even sometimes, like, can I see some back in analytics from the things that you're doing to grow your playlist? Now, some playlists curators would say no. And those are the ones I stay away from. If they're not willing to prove to me that they're actually doing the things that they said they're doing, I'm not giving you my money. You know what I'm saying? Plain and simple as that. Because usually the ones that are legit and are actually doing the things that they say they're doing to grow your their playlist will gladly provide you with info to show you that, you know, these players curators are salesmen at the end of the day. And any good sales person is going to give you as much information as you need to be comfortable with the buying process. I view playlists and there's no different way. You know what I'm saying? So if I ask you for proof of growing this playlist and you tell me you run an ad bro, you better see me some ad screenshots. Well, I'm going over to the Facebook ad archive and looking it up myself. And if I don't see anything, I'm calling Cal, you know what I'm saying? I'm out and I'm taking my money elsewhere. So that's literally one of the first things that you can do to all the playlists is just straight up ask the curator. Like after you've done your outreach somewhere in the email, once they have hit you back with the prices or whatever their conditions are for getting posted, just say, Hey, like, you know, I see your place has been going for a while. Can you tell me how you've been growing it? And can you provide me with some proof? And if you can give me that, you know what I'm saying? We can make business happen by the end of this day or whenever you want to make business happen. But it literally starts there. Ask them and ask them for proof. Another thing that I would recommend that you do is ask other artists that have been in the playlist with their experience has been like being in that playlist. Now from my personal experience, most artists would gladly help another artist or another person not get scammed if they themselves also feel like they have been scammed. So you can go through the playlist, find another artist that doesn't seem like they're too inaccessible, you know, maybe an artist that has only a couple of hundred or thousand followers on Instagram or Twitter or something like that. Someone that you can DM and get a conversation going. And then just ask them say, Hey, I noticed that you've been placed in chill rap 2021 for the last three weeks. What's your experience been like? I've talked to the curator myself. I'm thinking about getting myself placed and I would love to get an extra set of opinion on what it's been like since they've been in it. And once again, most artists will gladly tell you like, Hey, it's been great. I love it. My streams have went up by this much and they seem real. People have been saving and getting or they'll say, Hey, man, it really hasn't been worth it. You know, I went up a couple thousand streams without having got any playlist as I haven't got any saves. I'm scared it might be a scam. Now you also have to take this with a grain of salt, because sometimes people's songs just don't perform as well in the place as other people's song. But if you reach out to enough people in their place and you start to get the same consensus, right? Like you reach out to five artists and four of them tell you that it hasn't been worth it. Then chances are you're dealing with a place that's not worth it, you know, because once again, most artists aren't going to lie about that. They're going to gladly give you information to save yourself if they can, unless they're just salty or something like that. Literally, it starts there. Ask other artists in the playlist. What has your experience been like being in this playlist? Let them give you the experience and then internalize that and use it to strengthen your gut decision on whether you should go with it or whether or not you shouldn't go with it. The last thing that I do to our playlist is I use a tool called chart metric to look at the playlist growth history over the last week, two weeks and then 30 days. And I've talked about chart metric before. It's this data analysis tool that was created for A&Rs and marketers like myself. You can use it to see just a bunch of different social analytics around the artists, like their Twitter following Pandora analytics, Spotify analytics, like a bunch of different stuff, you know, they have a free account. So, you know, if you, if you, if you see the pricing and it scares you a little bit, that's cool, man, hit the free account. It's enough to do this auditing process. And once again, the auditing process is this, this is probably one of the more powerful things in the auditing process. So I want to jump into chart metric and actually show you what it is that I look for and what I look at. So here we are inside of chart metric. Once again, the website is chartmetric.com, chartmetric.io. You can make a free version to get this. I'm currently using the paid version, you know what I'm saying? We got like that. But the free version will get this job done and will be enough for you to audit your playlist. So what you want to do is you want to find the playlist that you're trying to search and audit, copy their playlist link and then copy it over here into the search bar in the top right. Though I wouldn't found like some rap playlist, I just searched rap on Spotify and went to the first rap playlist I saw. And that's what I'm going to use for this example. This one right here, rap bangers only. So once it loads up, it should bring you to this information screen about the playlist. So it has the bio that they have on Spotify, how many tracks are in the song, the total amount of players, followers and all this stuff. So what I do is I come down to the follower chart and look at their growth history for the last couple of, last couple of weeks to last 30 days or so. Right now I have it set to the last month. So what you want to look for is inconsistencies in their growth pattern. So like this one, this one looks legit. Like I would trust this playlist because as you can see, it's been on a pretty consistent uptrend for the last couple of weeks or so. It hasn't been any major spikes or any major dips. What you're looking for are suspicious increases in followers and then suspicious decreases in followers. I'm going to find a playlist in a second to show you what I'm talking about. But basically what you're looking for is a really sharp incline that doesn't make sense or really sharp decline that also doesn't make sense because these things indicate that either the curator has bought followers and that's why they got so many followers or their Spotify playlists have been purged by Spotify itself. And it's why they lost so many followers over the duration of that time. Also, you see how like this playlist career has been growing on an average of about 60 to 80 followers a day. If it like spiked to like 2,000 followers a day out of nowhere and then dropped back down, I would either A, assume that maybe the player's curator caught like a viral moment around some content and then I would go back to step one and ask them like, Hey, I noticed that on this day, you just happened to gain 2,000 followers out of nowhere. Like, do you know what happened? And if they don't, I would assume that they bought fake followers. So let me find a playlist that better iterates this example because this is actually a good example of a good growth chart on a playlist. So here's an example of a playlist that I found really quickly that is already giving me sketch vibes. So it's called Rap Caviar 2021. And if you come down to its growth chart, look at the inconsistencies in this growth chart, right? So it's going what out of nowhere it goes from doing about 27 followers a day to five to jumping up 5,000 back to one to 3,000. Then it sharply declines about 43,000 followers, starts to go back up, starts to go back up, goes down again, goes down, declines another 16,000 followers. And then I don't know where it gains with 100,000 followers over the course of a day. So this playlist is probably a scam playlist. Like, I don't know. I don't know these people I can 100% say, but all I know is I wouldn't give them my money, you know what I'm saying? Because this is already giving me red flag vibes. So it's not always going to be as dramatic as this. Sometimes it'll be a little dip, you know, but dips aren't always a bad indicator. Sometimes like things do happen, people do leave stuff, sometimes playlist curators get viral moments, a celebrity shares it or something like that. But when is this extreme? Like, come on, man, like you've been losing all these followers these days, you just gained 100,000 followers out of nowhere. That means they bought fake followers for the players or something like that. So what you're looking for is really dramatic increases or decreases in playlist followings using this chart metric tool that once again won't give you 100% peace of mind, but it usually points you in the right direction. Because even if a player's curator does have legit traffic on the playlist, if they're buying fake followers, you want to stay away from that anyway. Because even if, you know, if they have 100,000 followers and it has a thousand real people in it, that doesn't matter because it's going to be overshadowed by the other thousands of people that aren't real. And that's going to just mess things up. So use this. This is the last way that I use to audit playlist. Once I've talked to the curator and asked them all my questions, once I've reached out to artists that have been the influences, I come over to chart metric, look at that growth history. And I use that to put all my gut decisions together and go either yay or nay. You know what I'm saying? Either here you can have the bread, we can make this work or not. I'm gonna have to, you know, take my services somewhere else. Definitely check out the chart metric website and make this an integral part of your process. If you're using playlists, if you're using plays to market yourself and market your music. So there it is guys, those are my tips on how you can best out of the Spotify playlist. Once again, there is no 100% full proof way to 100% tell us if a place is fake or not until Spotify opens up his API completely and allows other developers to make a tool that can tell the type of stuff. Then we're pretty much left with these, these gut instincts that we have based off of the information that we gathered through asking the curators through talking to other artists in the playlist and then through our chart metric analysis that we've done ourselves. So put all those things together. Once again, use it to strengthen that gut feeling. Go with what your gut tells you. If you feel like it's worth it, go for it. If you don't feel like it's worth it, save your money, put it in something else because really you won't be able to 100% tell until the song gets into the playlist. And once it's in the playlist, you can tell if it's fake or not by if your saves are going up, if your playlist are going up and all that stuff. If all you're doing is getting streams with your saves and your playlists aren't going up, then either you're in a fake playlist or the song is bad and doesn't fit their playlist. If you're in a playlist and all those things are going up, your saves are going up, your followers are going up, your playlist ads are going up and the streams are going up, then it's a pretty solid playlist. You can stick with it. You can trust that curator and you can keep things going. Now I'm curious to know what you guys have been doing for those of you that have been doing playlists around yourselves. How do you audit playlists? Do you talk to the curators? Do you have another method? Drop that in the description below. I'm sure we love to hear about it. You know what I'm saying? Each one teach one. Let's all grow together. Other than that, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.