How To Write a Spotify Editorial Pitch | 3 Important Things
Spotify editorial playlists are super competitive, so its important you write a good pitch. In this video I show the entire process from start to finish, and share the 3 important characteristics of your Spotify playlist pitch. Get 7% off DistroKid when you signup through my link → distrokid.com/vip/andrewsouth...
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Great advice as always Andrew. I've used a combination of your approach along with another well known guru of social media and since 2019 been placed on 16 Editorial playlists. You guided me through facebook ad campaigns and submit hub to achieve these numbers. Thankyou so much for your informative videos and keep dropping knowledge for us independent artists! 🙂
Thanks Andrew! 🙌
great practical video! I've pitched so many songs over the years with no success. The last song of mine I pitched called "drink or two" got placed on the Spotify playlist "Indie Bluegrass" so it finally paid off! thanks Andrew all your videos or so informative!
Thanks man! Glad the videos have helped.
Thanks, im always keen to read other artists pitches
Great thanks!
Hey Andrew, great content, just interested in the spotify FB ads, course, obvs created over a year ago, is it still relevant or would you consider other ways of targeting? Cheers, Chis
Love from Manchester NH bro didnt realize you were so close
Great to see your approach to the pitch, Andrew, tnx! Is there a place where you can see your old pitches in Spotify for Artists? I got on a Spotify editorial two years go, but didn’t save that last overview page, so I can’t remember how I approached it and what I wrote. I do save everything now for reference, but haven’t got on an editorial since.
Unfortunately I don’t think so. That would be a great feature though.
Thank you for this great video! I have a question about social media ads, have you actually broke even with them or made a profit? I heard it was recommended to spend for instance 10 euros/ dollars a day on ads campaigns on social media, but that adds up and you would need a lot of streams in order to pay for that and to make a profit. Thank you a lot in advance.
great video thanks a lot! ill would love to know how you do the single release with the previous release and still keeps it the same release with the listens etc.
When you distribute you just re-use the ISRC code, the same title and audio file, and it will migrate the stream counts between the uploads.
I pitched some songs 4 days before release and they got playlisted twice. ( 2 different songs and genres). So Spotify 's recommendations are just that. Recommendations.
Its great thanks a lot but i just wanna know "Why the songs never get picked ? even if it's well mixed and mastered .."
Is it important to choose exact location on Step 2? Does it affect anything?
Your content is great, thank you for it. I have a solo black metal project, I don't think it has a big market, do you think it's worth it to promote it or should I just keep it as a hobby?
Thanks! Sometimes more niche genres are actually easier, because that makes it easier to stand out. - In hip-hop if you have 500k monthly listeners you're still basically nobody. - In black metal if you have 500k monthly listeners you're one of the biggest black metal bands in the world. Whether you try to market or keep it as a hobby should probably also factor in how good your stuff is in comparison to whats popular. Additionally, thinking of if you want to take music seriously or keep it simple and fun - bringing business into music ruins the fun for some people. Lastly, what does the potential for monetization look like? I would guess that in black metal shows are a huge part of the income, and merch. Metal often doesn't get the same type of streaming volume as other more mainstream genres, especially black metal, so that means you need other monetary paths.
I'm convinced a human barely read these and it's majority either who you know or proven stats scenario when it comes to editorials. So instead I just started writing jokes and talking sheeeeit to spotify. It leaves me feeling much better about everything:)
Hi Andrew, we had a strange effect with the waterfall release. The primary and new pitched song on the 2-songs EP got very low attention. whilst the 'B-side' with the older song was suddenly exploding on release radar with at the top 1000 streams/day. Any explanation for that ?
Was the same for me! I mean I did not hugely mind it because I am glad when any of my songs goes up a lot but I also wonder how that works.
Bro can you make a video on how to run ad campaigns in the countries which doesn't have that AD studio facility. I am from India, many marketers and distribution companies are placing banners ads and display ads on spotify but how are they using that? I did it personally but after coming into the payment section it said the address and the card is not of the same country. This is a big issue because here marketeres and agencies are doing it even having the non-availability of ad campaigns in india.
What exactly is meant by "holiday"? Like a national holiday such a the 4th of July? Or when you go on holiday, so in other words vacation? Another question, do you have any advice on choosing the genres strategically? For example my track is indie pop folk. Is it better to choose genres that are smaller and therefore smaller competition? or the genres that have more playlists and therefor more possibilities? Thank you so much!
Holiday is like Christmas music, or whatever the equivalent is for other cultures. In terms of targeting, it depends. Sometimes the smaller more niche artists and genres work better, sometimes the bigger and broader artists and genres work better. The only way to know is to try. I'd start with the niche ones first and then as your campaign runs try bigger and broader audiences.
Andrew - question on Waterfall release: when you publish a song “again”. My question: Will playlist placements achieved from the first “release” automatically apply to the new release? I don’t want to lose my playlists, but also don’t want to keep a bunch of old releases on my profile. Appreciate your insight
Yes, if you do it right
If you ask your distributor they'll basically tell you 'it should all work out okay, but we make no promises'. For this reason I just leave all the releases on my profile, since i'm not personally bothered by the additional releases. Everyone i've talked to has said it has worked out fine. But i'd proceed with caution, maybe remove a release that isn't doing super well and see what happens to the playlists its on. It SHOULD be fine, i'm probably just being paranoid.
@@AndrewSouthworth thanks! This is all new for me so far, but making progress. Appreciate your channel and all the information you give to the community. Going to write my next Spotify pitch in a day or two when my new song is loaded in anticipation of going live in about 3 weeks. Appreciate this video for pitching pointers.
can't you release an album and then release separate eps breaking songs from the album into groups (eps) afterwards? repitching then
Unfortunately no. You can’t repitch songs that were already released in the past, they also won’t go on release radar if they were previously released.
The 'Confirm where the artist is from isn't working.... ¿any ideas?
Why do people keep saying pitch 4-5 weeks before release? I pitch my songs 7 days on average before release and they still get in editorial playlists every time. My last release got me in 3 editorial playlists and the biggest with 1.7 million followers and I only pitched it 6 days before release.
True
My song dreaming was pitched 2 weeks before release and got added to 2 editorials a couple weeks after it came out. I think back in the day they had something that specifically said 5 weeks in advance. Perhaps that was just during the beta when the released it and everyone keeps saying that same number.
Can I take a listen?
I've heard that artists who have been placed in playlists before get listened to first, which makes sense due to the large quantity of pitches spotify gets daily. I'd say it's smart for smaller artists to pitch earlier than later to give spotify time to put it in the right place.
what genre are you?
you can do the editorial only BEFORE the track is released or even once is out?
Only before :/
But you can’t create an artist profile on Spotify until DistroKid has released your first song. Once they do you can link it to your artist profile. However once your song is released it’s too late to pitch to a playlist. Is there something I’m missing? How can we pitch our very first song release to a playlist since it needs to be released before we can actually create a Spotify artist account?
I had this exact same problem and just discovered how to do this. I don’t have the link but if you use the chat bot for distrokid support and tell them you’re asking about access to spotify for artists it will send you a link to an article that walks you through how to do it. You basically just need to get whats called a URI link to your Profile and upcoming song and enter it in to spotify through the regular process of signing up for an artist profile. They then emailed me asking for more info to verify its me and once I gave that to them they let me in!
Hello there! how did you get distrokid-Priority artist? and whats the thought behind it!? thank you!
They've sponsored videos on my channel, as soon as I started doing it years ago they made me a priority artist. I believe its all that and certain larger artists that get priority status.
@@AndrewSouthworth i very much appreciate it! i can see how this is the case, have a good day man!
How would you even pitch your song 4 weeks ahead if you pitch it in the description 🤔
I got a bit confused. Do you pitch the song and then you set the release via DistroKid, or is it the opposite?
when the track is set to release then you will get the pitching option on Spotify for artist, without scheduling the track via distribution will not work
It seems like landing an editorial placement nowadays got a lot harder since they've introduced Discovery Mode. It's just a consideration, but maybe with fewer editorial placements, Spotify is indirectly pushing artists to use Discovery Mode, earning a 30% share. 🤔
I haven’t seen any change personally. I have access to over 100 artists Spotify for artists so I get emails when any of them get added to an editorial. The thing with discovery mode, it only affects radio streams which usually aren’t substantial. So it’s not a 30% share, more like a a 5-10% share at most. I don’t think they game a feature to encourage such a small gain. The negative press would outweigh the benefits.
How do you pitch a song that hasn’t been released? So if I upload a song to CD Baby, for example, it’s uploaded. Then it gets inspected…and then it’s sent to Spotify. Where in that process is it “unreleased”?
You set a release date for whenever you want, and you send it to Spotify whenever you want. So it might sit on Spotify waiting to come out for months, weeks or days depending on how early you upload it.
Thanks for the reply. Not sure I get it yet... Do you mean that if I pick a release date when I upload to the distributor of 6 weeks in the future, it'll get sent to Spotify at some point before "release" and that is when I can pitch it? I didn't realize that a distributor sends it to Spotify and it can just sit in song purgatory for a while awaiting the release date that I've picked with the distributor. Is that what you mean? Thanks again@@AndrewSouthworth
And btw, CD Baby seems to be having trouble, so I'm going to try Distrokid next. :)
But can i pitch songs even after theyre released?
Nope, has to be before they're released.
Not commented in a while but 40,000 streams for one song would be pretty life changing to me. Of course, not in the sense of actual life changing but for an artist who for years on years now has basically no streams on Spotify in context of the world of streams. My highest is just over a thousand, the rest of my catalogue is no where close I imagine but that's difficult to know. I have tried I think 7 times now for the playlist but nothing. In terms of the pitch, I thought they had got rid of it so they just listen to the song. Personally, I think you could write the most eloquent thing in the world but if they don't like the song, it really doesn't matter. And if you have huge amounts of streams or followers then why would you need the playlist except of course to expand what you already have achieved.
There are a few more elements at play for a pitched song beyond the song itself and the pitch content. Artists have internal "genres" assigned to them based on artists they are frequently played with (but only beyond a specific threshold). There are also certain hidden achievements or "gatekeeping tiers" that exist on most platforms (including Spotify), which is often used as an initial filter for quality. The assumption being, if you bring in your own fans and reach organic growth of a certain amount then the general population is responding well to your music. Ultimately, it's still worth it to pitch your songs because anything can happen. But you should also be sure to focus on increasing your fanbase externally, which will help bring more weight to your releases. Finding a label can help with this a lot, but there are many bad ones out there too. So it's hard to make the right call. Definitely don't assume there's a quality issue with your music though. Keep at it, keep improving and learning new things, and most of all enjoy what you're doing.
@@FluoLente Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, nothing I do gains me any traction whatsoever. I might get a couple of streams a week at best. And my music isn't bad by any means. Perhaps, it's not to everyones taste and that's fine but I have been doing this for years and years and honestly gotten nowhere. I'm not interested in any labels or anything like that. Advertising does nothing for me but then again I don't really have much money and social media is a dead zone. I could post a thousand times a day and still nothing will happen. Well . . . maybe it would but I'm not posting a thousand times a days. I'm not quitting because music is my life. As much as it would be nice to get some streams it doesn't stop me from writing new music.
you are an inspiration for many of us. So proud to see your comment here!@@TJ-vt6rt
What you are doing is doing your karma and not asking for its results, God is by your side, success will come to you eventually, Hare Krishna!
hey! I feel you but I disagree with a bit with Fluolente. There very well could be a quality issue with your music. Give me your spotify handle and I'll take a listen and give some objective feedback. Also this is a conversation for another day but social media is the only and most important way to promote music (without spending money). It is not a dead zone. @@TJ-vt6rt
damn andrew im first.... i need your heeeeeelppppp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hey! I have a consulting calendar in my description if you're looking for some 1-on-1 help.
40k streams is life changing.
no it's not at all
Shoot I'm releasing a Christmas song short notice
cant pitch a song only if pay for pro...
You don’t need to pay anything to pitch.
but i think you do as one of the requests is to pitch with at least 7 days before release and you can't schedule a song over 7 days only with pro... @@AndrewSouthworth
It sounds like maybe your distributor gives you that limitation. Spotify itself does not require any type of payment to pitch. If your distributor doesn't let you schedule tracks more than 7 days in the future, I would switch distributors or plans. DistroKid (Musician Plus and above), CD Baby, TuneCore, Amuse etc don't have this limitation.
Release date Today Want to set a future release date? Consider upgrading . yes... i think is distrokid @@AndrewSouthworth
Has anyone noticed that they don't do that description part anymore? I just pitched my new release yesterday and that part wasn't there! Did they just change it?
It was still there for me
You need to scroll up
So you cant pitch a released song
Unfortunately no.
@@AndrewSouthworth damn it !!
Spotify doesn't recommend pitching weeks before release date. I don't know why everybody keeps saying this. Also it's just not true. We landed editorials and always pitched only one week in advance. I appreciate your work but I think these videos about how to land a Spotify editorial are just for the clicks and likes on KZhead.
It used to say directly on the Spotify for Artists dashboard that they recommended you pitch 4-5 weeks prior to release. Perhaps that was just back when they launched the pitching tool and since everyone learned that timeline then, it became common knowledge that no longer applies. You can get editorials pitching later, my song was pitched 2 weeks prior to launch and then got added to a couple editorials 2 weeks after launch. I never said it was required to pitch weeks before. Another thing about editorials is if you ever have 'enhanced' editorial pitching through a distributor or label, they often want 5-8 weeks advance. You're acting like I post videos on this topic all the time. I haven't made a video on editorial playlists in 1 year. Since the last one i've done 800+ additional consulting calls with artists one on one and seen how dozens more artists do their pitches. It was time for a refresh.
Andrew doesn't ever post for clicks. It's thanks to his content I've been able to build my own fan base. As for editorial pitching I pitched my latest song circles 4 weeks in advance and it got put in the Just Dropped play list. It's probably just a guideline and a week in advance can be fine too. Doesn't really matter.
Glad the content has helped you out dude! Congrats on the playlist as well.
This pitch is a scam, don't waste your time on it.
You'll see from the other comments that it is definitely not a scam. Also, it only takes a couple of minutes to fill it out.
@@AndrewSouthworth Ive always spent way to much time filling out that pitch, but with the newest help of AI i will fill out in just a Minute in the future 😂
ur just bad bro