Playlist Push

What Artists Should Know About Playlist Push

UPDATE: I gave Playlist Push another whirl in March, and they’ve come a long way since I wrote this. You won’t miss anything if you skip straight to my latest review, Playlist Push Revisited.

My Spotify numbers are weak compared to my other social stats. I hover around 1200 listeners and 3600 streams per month. Very few of those streams come from playlists, which means I’ve got a lot of room for improvement!

Spotify How They Stream

Sadly, the stats above are after my campaign with Playlist Push, a paid service that promises to get your music on Spotify playlists. So uh… spoiler alert?

The way it works is, you start by submitting your track for review. I went with Glory Days, which as you may remember, received my highest score yet on ReverbNation’s Crowd Review (see my review).

The track is approaching 16K plays on SoundCloud, without any recent promotion from me. Maybe my $500 Deezer campaign helped? The song seems to be doing pretty well everywhere but Spotify.

That said, another Spotify playlist pitching service I was hoping to review, The Falling Apple, rejected it.

Anyway, Playlist Push followed up with an approval email explaining how the process works:

Playlist Push instructions

I sent them the $285, and as promised, heard back from them the day after the campaign launched with links to three playlists that added me. After two weeks, I received a link to a page detailing the results of my campaign.

Of the 53 curators the track was sent to:

  • 17 didn’t listen or chose not to respond
  • 13 responded neutrally or critically to the track
  • 10 said it didn’t fit their playlist(s)
  • 8 responded positively to the track, but didn’t add it and didn’t explain why
  • 5 added it to their playlist

You can download a PDF of my results if you’re so inclined.

My Playlist Push Placements

Viral Chill by viralinsomnia – 24,953 followers

UPDATE: The playlist is no longer available.

This is by far the biggest playlist from a followers standpoint, and contains some great tracks. Glory Days is currently positioned 126th out of 128.

Despite the positioning, it would be a big win if the followers were genuine. Unfortunately, Spot on Track reports some suspicious activity. The number of playlist followers doubled in two days, from 13.5K to 25K.

Viral Chill Playlist

I looked at another source to confirm, and found the same pattern reported by Chartmetric:

viralinsomnia on Chartmetric

One viralinsomnia playlist doubled in follower count in the last 28 days (again, over two days), while the others didn’t budge. Note that the doubling of Viral Chill followers happened just before the 28-day window Chartmetric is reporting.

This strikes me as very unlikely.

Spotify for Artists lists all playlists featuring my songs that have reached 25 unique listeners, and the only one it has ever shown is Release Radar. If 25K actual listeners really followed Viral Chill, don’t you think my song would hit at least 25 of them?

Dreaming Awake by criticalnetwork – 8,458 followers

UPDATE: The playlist is no longer available.

This playlist is a grab bag of artists with low listener counts. My guess is that it was created as a repository for all Playlist Push tracks. Their mini-review of my song is “Fantastic work! Added to our playlist!” which doesn’t inspire confidence that they actually listened to it. No matter — they dropped my track after a couple of weeks anyway.

Chartmetric reports the same suspicious follower count activity across criticalnetwork’s playlists:

criticalnetwork on Chartmetric

Critical Network has only 294 followers on SoundCloud, and no website or social links. Something doesn’t add up!

Worldwide Select by worldwiderecordsmx— 4,998 followers

UPDATE: The playlist is no longer available.

Worldwide Records is a legit label. I can’t find any data on the playlist on either Spot on Track or Chartmetric, and they already dropped my track, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt despite their suspiciously generic non-review: “It’s a good track, I like the vibe on this.”

Fortunately, you don’t need to pay $285 to submit your track to them, as the playlist description reports:

Worldwide Select

Sunday Selects by eternitynetwork — 6,462 followers

Eternity Network is legit. You can submit directly to them on SubmitHub, so again, no need to spend $285. The follower count increase for Sunday Selects has been slow and steady, with a reasonable 2.9% change over 28 days.

Sadly, my track was dropped after 24 days, before reaching 25 unique listeners. The review of “i like this, adding it” doesn’t suggest that they actually listened. Maybe they just accept all tracks and rotate them regularly.

Indie Discovers by Manel Juanico Iveldie – 505 followers

It’s clear from Manel’s thoughtful review that he listened to my track, but I’d be willing to bet that he approves everything. He adds several tracks every day, and 100% of the currently 159 tracks were added this month. Listen for yourself and decide if these really are “the best upcoming artists and new releases on Spotify,” as the playlist description promises.

The description ends with, “To be in this playlist visit https://playlistpush.com.” It strikes me as a side business rather than an artistic enterprise.

Yes, curators are paid. On a sliding scale from $1-7 based on a variety of factors, one of them being the quality of written reviews. So in Manel’s case, it would be easy to make a couple hundred bucks or more every month by taking a little time each day to review and add tracks to his all-inclusive indie playlist — without needing to fuss about quality or genre.

Playlist Push CEO responds

I spoke with George Goodrich, CEO of Playlist Push, this morning after sharing a draft of this article with him. We talked for a solid 40 minutes about not just my campaign, but the difficulties in running this sort of platform.

Playlist Push launched in May and hosts 170 curators as of this writing. Their small team hasn’t been able to keep up with the influx of curators, and clearly hasn’t been screening as judiciously as they should. Their primary focus now is weeding out the bad apples. In fact, at least two of the curators who approved my track have already been dropped (that’ll teach y’all for liking my music!).

Specifically, they want to review artists’ CSV files from Spotify for Artists, to see which of their playlists are generating actual streams.

Another issue I brought up is that artists aren’t provided with the names of the playlists from curators who declined to add their track. Therefore I have no way to judge the quality and legitimacy of the other playlists my track was submitted to.

George explained that it’s mainly for privacy reasons, because they’ve had problems with artists hounding curators on Facebook. I suggested that they instruct curators to disconnect their Facebook accounts from Spotify, and he promised to look into that solution.

Conclusion and recommendations

To put it bluntly, my Playlist Push campaign did nothing for me. My Spotify for Artists account doesn’t register even a slight bump in streams, listeners, or followers, and none of the playlists that added my track hit 25 unique listeners.

Of course, your mileage may vary, but I’d recommend starting by pitching to Spotify curators on SubmitHub (my review here) for $1 per submission. You’ll know exactly who you’re pitching to, and if they don’t provide written feedback within 48 hours, you get your money back.

George offered to try another campaign with a different song in the future, providing more hands-on assistance to ensure it goes to the right curators.

Should you decide to give it a try, please support the site by using my affiliate link. Use coupon code KNNX437 for a 7.5% discount on your first campaign. Curators can sign up here.

I’m going to try out the platform as a curator with my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist. I’m targeting a very specific niche, so I’m curious to see if anything fits within the broad genres I selected (Electronic, EDM, Pop).

Have you tried Playlist Push, The Falling Apple, or any other Spotify pitching service?

Please share your results in the comments, and don’t forget to read about my more recent experience with Playlist Push!

88 Comments

  1. It seems to me that most “listeners” these days are not real people. I have no idea how to solve that problem when web traffic, follows, subscribers, and page “likes” can simply be spoofed.

    I guess it’s a matter of supply vs. demand. There are so many of us artists out there making so much music, but real listeners who are interested in what we’re making and willing to spend time finding it are rare.

    I just got another “top 10” 100 pop score with my song “Dream Together” on Radio Airplay / Jango last week. Zero sales. Zero free downloads. Zero plays on my bandcamp page (which is front and center on the promo unit). Does it mean anything at all about my music?

    As an artist I’m looking for income, ideally, even a small one. $20/month would be fantastic! But failing that, I’d really appreciate some validation from real people who enjoy my music. So far… nothing, except from people I personally knew already.

    Brian, thanks for kicking the tires of this “service” so that I don’t have to.

    1. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Walt! Dare I say congratulations on the top 10?

      You’re absolutely right — when every possible metric from followers to streams to video views can be bought, how do we measure success?

      I’d argue sales is a poor choice. I’ve always opted for email subscribers, but that doesn’t capture the totality of a fanbase.

      For now I guess we just keep putting out our best work, and figuring it out as we go!

    1. Good catch, Jake. I just outed him in the comments section of his Medium article, with a link back to Brian’s post here.

      Brian, thank you for all the time and research you spend on these services. This is some real investigative journalism type shit you’re doing. I’ve invested money into most of the services you speak highly off and I’ve never been disappointed. But more importantly, you’ve helped me dodge a lot of bullets. You’re great.

    2. If you do a little more searching you find that George published an e-book called the Slotify Method. he also used to work for Soundcloud so he does have some insight into streaming services and playlisting.

    3. That is really funny that you found that LMAO! For me Playlist Push is just way too overpriced! I felt like i just didn’t get value for money with Playlist Push. You get a much better return on investment just finding playlists on Spotify yourself and using their listed details on the playlist bio to submit to them, essentially removing the pricey cut that Playlist Push take for being the middle man. For example, I submitted my music directly to @xmusicpromotion and @playlistking via Instagram and it cost me about 1/10th of the price of Playlist Push with the same sort of streams received.

  2. Thanks for this review, Brian. A band I manage had an equally disappointing experience with Playlist Push. Mainstream pop rock song, which George happily accepted. Lots of promises were made, but none fulfilled. He got them on two very small individual playlists, neither of which ever hit 25 monthly listeners. He refused to tell us how many playlists he pushed it to, what genres they covered, etc. He claimed at the beginning that 80% of his artists make their $200 back with at least 60,000 streams. Yet he refused in the end to provide any backup or examples for this stat. The band later worked to contact playlists themselves, in the end being added to over 70 legitimate playlists, over 30 of which send over 25 unique monthly listeners to the song, and some of which send hundreds of monthly listeners. So any argument that the song wasn’t good enough for the Playlist Push curators doesn’t ring true.

    Also, in the comments section of his review in which you called him out, he claims that Playlist Push hired him in late September after he published his review. That is an all-out lie, we worked with him in June and he was the only person contacting us from Playlist Push. I included that little detail in the comments section.

    Playlist Push is just another outfit out to grab artists’ hard-earned money. I recommend artists work on their own to submit songs to playlists. They’ll get the music into real ears, and many of those playlists don’t drop a song after a week or month.

    1. I’m sorry to hear Playlist Push didn’t work out for you either Nathan.

      But wow, the band did an incredible job on their own! With tools like Chartmetric, I suppose it’s within any artist’s power to handle pitching on their own if they’re willing to put in the time.

      Fwiw I’ve been on the curator end of Playlist Push for a few days now, and have been getting some quality submissions, many from artists who have hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners. I’m not sure what kind of value they’re seeing from the service, or how much they’re paying, but in theory it’s legit. I for one am providing the most helpful reviews I can, and adding tracks when they are “close enough” — all for a measly $0.75 a pop.

  3. Was just searching through a few of these services for one of my artists and this helped us decide what to do (or rather which service not to use)

    Just a quick note, the URL you linked for Chartmatic is incorrect, seems like the right one is : https://chartmetric.io/

    Thanks again, I’ve subscribed to the newsletter as well.

    Emily

  4. My experience with Playlist Push is…. I didn’t get into the deal. In the end, it is a pool of curators (that do their work better or worse) and Playlist Push connects them with artists. To get 250 € from this is, IMHO quite exaggerated. I would certainly consider paying 25 €, but not 250 €..

    Three things convinced me not to get into the deal:

    1) The huge amount of secret around playlist curators. In comparable platforms such as Submithub you perfectly know who is on the other side, and in theory you can “steal” the list and pitch yourself. The point is that it is much more comfortable to pitch within the platform, But now compare the transparence of SubmitHub and the opaqueness of Playlist Push on one side – and their financial results on the other side. SubmitHub is doing over 50k/month, if their numbers are true.

    2) The fact that I build up on my own a database with ca.300 playlist curators in my niche (piano/classical), and my music is already in 90 playlists (with more than 25 unique monthly listeners). So I quite know the scene and I know that it is extremely difficult to offer other curators in this particular genre. Since George didn’t tell me concrete names of concrete curators… how can I assume that they will be different from those on my list? Again, I would risk 25€ – but in the end of the day this is not a lottery, is a pay-for-results game.

    3) I asked a few friend curators who I good had reasons to think they were working at Playlist Push. Some told me that they smell something not completely OK and decided not to get into the deal. Even if they were not risking any money – on the contrary.

    The funny thing is that all this can be done correctly, transparently and offering real value, which is hidden behind a fog wall. I cannot understand why.

    Having said that … Feel free to check my music. Maybe you will become one of my almost 50k monthly listeners::
    https://open.spotify.com/artist/0sr00YxbHKRAruzYrJ6PEg

    Juan María

    1. Playlist Push taught me that there’s no shortcut to the kind of work you’re doing by reaching out to curators directly. Since I’ve been messing around on the curator end, I’ve had a couple people reach out to me about adding their track to my playlist — which I’ve done. Honestly, it’s a lot harder to say no when someone messages you on Facebook!

  5. Damn, thanks for this article. I was also intrigued to put my money into playlist push after my song was accepted by their A&R Team. If not for this analysis of yours, I would have dumped money and risk getting no returns from this!

  6. Hi Brian, thank you for your review and time. Sometimes we just looking for possibilities and would like to believe anything, because the dream of a easy and fast success is so compelling. But if we would be realistic we wouldn’t make some of those mistakes. 😉 Thank you for the links.

    What I can offer to all the users here, send me your track and if this will fits to my playlist(POP, EDM, URBAN..), I will add it. I have just over 70 Followers, but me and my friends really listen to this list. For free. 🙂

    https://open.spotify.com/user/kalmell/playlist/3Xws1GNELHErASxqkfDgWC?si=-zNc9jtDT8ONgHMLTqizhw

    Best
    Alex

  7. I am so happy i stumbled across this article. Where is everyone based be great to set up a monthly online chat? Cross exchange ideas and find out what works for people. So whats working for people now, anyone had some great plugger or playlist promotion success stories? All I can say proper reviews of services is so important in an industry where PR and pluggers seem to milk money out of musicians. I’m from London, so if you are ever in London be happy to show you around the main music spots!

    1. Hey Nick!

      There are Facebook groups too, which is probably easier than a chat. I find it easiest when people comment here on a relevant post. At least that way the conversation is fairly organized.

      I don’t plan to be in London anytime soon, but I appreciate the offer!

  8. my campaign with Playlistpush ends tomorrow, so far I have 26 playlist adds, 200k follower reach, estimating that I only received 3-4k streams due to Playlistpush. The song itself has 13.3k total stream, 4.8k streams from Release Radar, and the rest from another playlist pitching service. Total playlist follower reach is about 720k according to Chartmetric. I’ll write about my Playlistpush experience over the weekend at my website. You can listen to my song ‘Take Me Away’ on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/track/2OiJNZvqPQcc0k4rUxfXsD?si=aFeUqyD6TLSo9VhrcXiaWA

    1. That’s pretty good! Remember that those playlist adds are feeding the Release Radar streams. Without Playlist Push, it’s a safe bet your total streams would be far lower. Congratulations!

  9. As a curator, I was excited to work with PlaylistPush, I have my blogging set up through SubmitHub but I’ve been looking to split out the curation into a different channel; I thought with the thousands of reviews I have written for SubmitHub already, that I could bring some expertise to the table. I have worked hard to grow the lists that I have, but apparently my active listener count was too low, or something, so my account was deleted, even though I’d already written a few reviews, all with no communication from PlaylistPush. That doesn’t seem like a very honorable way to do business; I was about to start a FB and Twitter campaign to grow more listeners and try to get those numbers up. Guess I’ll just do something else. 🙁 – it seemed like a pretty well designed interface, but certainly they have some way to go on the human level.

    1. I hope it was a mistake! Did you contact Playlist Push? You’d think if they let you add your playlist in the first place, that it would stay eligible unless they had reason to believe you were gaming the system. Clearly they need to do right by the curators to make the service work as advertised.

  10. Thanks for the Article Brian ..just stumbled across this..Its a really good area to explore as I, like others, looked for pushers but must say looks too dodgy to me. I don’t want artificial fans I need to know the truth more than anything. I am a songwriter ..did minimal twitter campaign and got 75 followers in a month on spotify ..(Is that ok?)..but it cost me nothing..also had 100 sales of single on Apple same period..It maybe small but at least I know its real. George

    1. So many Georges in this subject 🙂 Do you mean that you made a twitter campaign “by hand”? O also paid ads?
      75 Spotify followers / month is not bad, except that you were George Harrison.

    2. 75 followers in a month sounds like solid progress, but it really depends how many hours you put into the promotion. If it takes, say, 50 hours, you might be better off with Playlist Push. I always suggest testing the songs first with Crowd Review and/or SubmitHub to make sure listeners are responding.

        1. The comments I got from Playlist Push curators were only slightly more tactful than the ones I get from SubmitHub. Crowd Review is definitely different… there’s a certain innocence to their dismissiveness. It’s more pure I guess. 😉

  11. Wow, am I GLAD I came across your article! It’s a good thing I read this before I dumped a boatload of money into DIY music promotion via such playlist services. Thanks a lot for your honest review, Brian.. this probably saved a few musicians (like me) from a whole lotta grief, lol

    PS: Nice to see you’re into Synthwave / New Wave Retro.. my recent Retrowave release is right along those lines!

  12. Nice article Brian, I found it while reviewing and contemplating to sign up with Playlist Push. How can synthwave / synthpop artists submit to your Synthpop Wonderland playlist?

    1. Be sure to read the “revisited” article before making any decisions!

      As for my playlist, it’s small enough that I don’t get many submissions. Feel free to tweet me a link or whatever…

  13. I tried submithub but despite 18 attempts I had no success in getting my song into the blog or playlist. Anyway I received some nice feedback anyway. Same with the cd’s i’ve pressed. I sold only one copy when I tried on the internet. Anyways, I don’t wanna give up. Though some little income would be nice. During the years Ive spend already 25 000 dollars to this sweet hobby..

    1. Don’t feel too bad about the lack of approvals. It’s a tough crowd!

      I don’t bother pressing CDs anymore. Unless you’re playing live and selling them in-person, I’d save your money.

      Don’t forget you can write off those expenses! (disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer)

  14. Thanks for encouraging! Yes, it seems to be very tough. Anyway I’m gonna keep submitting tracks. I like to my CD at least for myself. BTW, here is my own collaborative list. Feel free to submit your tracks there. Here is some rock and maybe some pop music too.

    https://open.spotify.com/user/namipassi/playlist/534Sda3VybsYMD9Rlc3Rxj?si=o3k_R1BZSaeBj4MuSKFyzQ

    And here some disco/EDM list.

    https://open.spotify.com/user/namipassi/playlist/4elqPRRGQnyy3jCZmaCxuB?si=Gc_EiYD5R8WsVZoxFmiqJQ

  15. great to read that you spoke to the ceo of playlist push. I tried to contact them many times and they only replied once with a short message, which even was no answer to my question lol. Thanks for all the deep insights Brian, you made me save a lot of money! I did some good experiences with https://playlist-promotion.com. I made a campaign for 600$, got 21 playlist placements and they placed me in average between position 10-30. All playlists perform good, some stronger, some less, but realistic to the amount of followers. I gained almost 150000 streams and around 2000 new fans yet, can`t complain

    1. Sorry to hear you didn’t have any luck getting the answers you were looking for from Playlist Push! I’ve actually heard a number of success stories since publishing my article, and I can see from my dashboard that more and more people are using the 7.5% discount code they gave me (KNNX437).

      That said, 2000 new fans – if you mean actual Spotify followers – is really impressive! I hadn’t heard of Playlist Promotion, and the grammatical mistakes in their site copy don’t instill confidence, but it looks like it’s basically the same sort of thing. I wonder if there’s any overlap between playlists.

    2. Looks like you run the site and are plugging it yourself. Best of luck with your platform. We are always online at PlaylistPush.com if you have a question “Luger” 😀

  16. yea I wanted to try out if they could place my song to even more playlists, but with the feedback from this and several other sites plus the bad customer service I am not really convinced :/

  17. what other page similar to playlistpush do you recommend? I have an active playlist with about 2.2k of followers increasing daily

  18. I am also very curious about how to purchase “organic followers”, In this sense, “organic” is, by definition, something that you cannot directly influence. Correct if if I’m wrong.
    That alone is a red flag, as red as the reddest of the flaggests.

    I am tempted to contact the “previous clients” and ask for their experiences. But what would I win?

    1. You’re talking about Spotify Plugger, right? There were a bunch of spam comments with a link to the site from the same guy, so I deleted them.

      But yeah, that’s not my understanding of the word organic either.

      As a comparison, Google Ads has a metric called “Earned Views” which are extra views on your channel by people who saw your ad. That’s what I think of as organic. Not something you pay for directly.

      As for previous clients, I guess an easy first pass would be to see how they’re doing on Spotify. If they’ve got 32 monthly listeners, something is awry.

  19. “Organic growth is the growth rate a company can achieve by increasing output and enhancing sales internally. This does not include profits or growth attributable to takeovers, acquisitions or mergers.”

    in my perspective, purchasing whatever, also legally / legit ads, is NOT organic. In Facebook you even have “organic likes” vs “paid advertisement”.

    Of course I am not doing a drama about thos – only wondering about the combination of words that, for me, sounds like “black snow”..

    1. Paid is the opposite of organic, for sure! Those follower numbers are pretty questionable. I’m going to stay away from Spotify Plugger if only because my spidey sense is tingling. I don’t want to risk being banned from the platform.

  20. We just invested 300 usd to promote our launch single Lady Luck – In My Head. We thought if it worked to help diffuse our music via PlayListPush we’d invest more. In 24 hours we’ve had 2 rejections that use the same word and style of writing and comments that seem totally disconnected from our music. One talks about weak production, but we have a the top producer from Spain and our musicians also work with bands like red hot chilli peppers, another he comment talks about not liking the performance,… Its not a video we sent so this comment threw us too. We dont see either that they actually listened to our song. Overall it looks suspicious. Looks like a waste of time money and questionable exploitation of musicians with good intentions and doing what they can to get their music heard.

    1. Thanks for sharing your results!

      I know they work hard to filter out the riffraff but it sounds like they could do a better job. I can understand the temptation from the curator end to have some copy/paste responses, even though it’s lazy. Sometimes you just know a track isn’t going to work, but it takes a lot of mental energy to come up with a unique rejection every time. That’s why I gave up curating so quickly! Of course that doesn’t make it okay.

      I would report the offending curators directly to Playlist Push so they can investigate and see if the copy/paste is a pattern.

    2. Hey Joana,

      Happy to chat about your campaign with us shoot me an email [email protected] and we will take a look. We do verify each curator listens to the song we also see how much of the song they listen to. Also we now have a report a curator feature that allows you to alert us to bad reviews.

  21. I recently purchased a $350 campaign from an online Spotify promotion company that claims to pitch a song to a list of playlists. Each playlist has anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 followers and within two weeks Ive racked up 17,000 plays and 5,000 monthly listeners from a variety of cities all over America. But how do I know that the streams are coming from real people and not bots? I’d rather have 100 real streams than 100,000 fake ones.

    I’ve also noticed that all the other artists on these playlists are also independent and mostly unknown. Are we all getting scammed together? One of my worries is getting shadow-banned.

    My last question is, how is a fake stream generated?

    Thanks guys!

    1. A couple of things to look for:

      1. The majority of plays come from a few cities (sounds like this isn’t the case)
      2. A low save ratio (shouldn’t be less than 1% even with your weakest track)

      The fact that the other artists are also unknown is a red flag. I’d check their “About” sections and see if the majority of their plays are coming from this playlist.

      A fake stream is generated by a bot, which from what I understand, are really cheap to buy and operate. It’s essentially an automated program that can run on your computer. Not that you’d need to do it yourself — there are server farms for hire with a gajillion bots running simultaneously.

      As you can tell, I’m no expert on bots. I don’t want to have anything to do with them!

      If you want to provide the name of the company and/or playlist, I’d be happy to investigate.

        1. Sorry for the delay Courtney!

          Looking at the first one, all the Uber Playlists are growing very slowly. The best of the 16 playlists gained 18 new followers in 28 days.

          They are averaging a 10% listener to follower ratio. For Uber Sex, there were 300 listeners for 3289 followers.

          The second playlist, Brooklyn Ways, also isn’t producing many listeners. It looks like maybe 600 per month, which is quite low considering the 14.6K followers (4%).

          The curator’s other playlists have less than 10% listener to follower ratio.

          Both playlists consist of mainly independent artists, and seem legit enough to me. If they were going to fake plays, I’d expect the numbers to be more impressive.

  22. I’ve experimented with a couple of them. Spotify plugger “seemed” to be legitimate, the listeners weren’t that engaging but I guess the cheap plan wasn’t genre specific or something. I did get 5k streams, then taken off in 2 weeks once I hit the quota I guess.

    I recently tried spotistar and regretted it. $20 for 100 followers and 1,000 streams. A couple days later, I had 120 more followers, 1k more streams, but the artist app didn’t show any playlists, which I thought was strange. I emailed the company and said you guys gave me 100 fake followers and 1,000 bot plays, the opposite of what your website describes, I hope I don’t get kicked off spotify now. No response.

    The journey I’ve taken over the last couple weeks of looking in to these type of companies, really worries me. For instance, I later got picked up by an independent playlist for a couple weeks, with 35k followers. I looked them up on chartmetric, something like 3,000 listeners.That is only possible if you’re buying fake followers. (I did get a steady 150 daily streams though)

    What worries me, is that these inflated “bot plays” which are very cheap to buy, are going to cost streaming companies like spotify a lot of money, and will eventually be there downfall. “Spotisar” offers 5k streams for $29, and I’m guessing they deliver them pretty quick.

    So when we see all these cheesy tik tok rappers with 20 million followers, its safe to say that all the labels are probably doing this too. In the end, If streaming goes down, independent artists go down. We’ll never stand a chance, hopefully they can put an end to bot plays or outlaw them.

    Great article

    1. Thanks for sharing your experiences Tony! I’ve been asked to try Spotify plugger aka Playlist Plugger, but now I won’t bother.

      I never heard of Spotistar but obviously I’ll stay away from them too. Buying followers who don’t like your music strikes me as self-destructive. It’s not like follower count is visible enough to serve as social proof anyway.

      Actually, I think 3000 listeners is reasonable with 35K followers. Are there any other clues that the streams are fake? Did you check the geography of the streams in Spotify Artists?

      1. Spotify plugger: they were spread out across the US with LA having the largest share. Only thing that struck me odd, was the randomness of genres. I have a hard rock song up, next to an autotune song, piano jazz, pop, hip hop etc. So evidently theres 3 playlists with 11k listeners, that just listen to everything. Got something like 7500 plays, 4 followers, and about 200 more streams than listeners. I forget the target reach, but it was a large number, 70k or something.
        Playlists: hot music, top music, cool stuff.
        That exposure got me on another playlist for a while, with justin bieber, for a couple weeks. But it was not connected to the service I believe.

        Spotistar: I cant really analyze much. Felt more like trading bitcoin or something. You want 100 organic followers and 1000 premium spotify plays? Check your account in 48 hours.
        They stuck to their word, but its almost like they hacked in to change my numbers. But I bought plays, not playlists this time, so I dont know.

        I can only investigate so much with the artist app, and a free chartmetric account. So dont let 1 reviewer affect the legitimacy of an online company whom I dont know.

        You should do one on spotify plugger, they seemed legit, not sure.

        1. Wow, so Spotify Plugger doesn’t even organize their playlists by mood or genre? Who would listen to that? I’m guessing your save ratio wasn’t impressive. From what you’ve said, it doesn’t strike me as legit, but even if it was, it clearly didn’t move your career forward any more than Spotistar.

          For now I’ll likely do any Spotify plugging myself, as I’m focused on getting on the “right” playlists, laser-targeted to my genre, including artists I’d like to see in my “Fans Also Like.”

  23. Their response to my review on trust pilot was that, you bought the cheapest tier. Those campaigns are not genre specific.

  24. Just discovered your blog. Thanks for the info. I am giving submithub a try.
    Loving your playlist Vocal Synthwave Retrowave

  25. Hi Brian,

    This has been a really helpful review even now a few years on.

    Given we are a few years on, I’d love to know what you think are the best services out there currently? I already use Submit Hub and like it a lot, any others you’d recommend?

    Cheers,

    Dom

    1. For playlist pitching specifically? I haven’t been using any.

      You did see my updated Playlist Push review, right? It’s slightly less old!

      That said, I may try it again one of these days, perhaps just for influencer marketing. I’m also planning to try out Playlist Blaster.

      For the most part, I’ve just been promoting my own playlist, as I’ve detailed in a few articles. I’m hoping to write a new one on Facebook Ads best practices in the next week or so.

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