What Artists Should Know About artist.tools

Last August, I took Spotify playlist pitching into my own hands using a service called OKTIV.IO (read the gory details here). My efforts resulted in 16 playlist adds, 2K+ streams, and a monster spreadsheet of leads.

I deemed the effort worthwhile, but way too much to take on with every release. A new service called artist.tools inspired me to give it another go.

artist.tools provides context on 40K+ playlists and 5K+ curators, including contact information, bot detection, listener estimates, and historical data.

As of this writing, artist.tools has identified over 2K scam contacts to avoid. It will notify you if your music is found in a botted playlist, and keeps track of your playlist adds and removals.

artist.tools playlist data

Let’s take a look at what kind of info artist.tools presents, starting with my playlist:

If you’re short on time, the box on the right tells you all you need to know. I’m sporting a high quality playlist with positive growth that accepts a lot of unpopular songs.

“Unpopular” sounds a bit harsh, but it’s based on Spotify’s popularity index. It’s rare that I add tracks with a popularity score above 30 (out of 100).

Looking at Spotify for Artists, I see 890 listeners in the past 28 days, which aligns with the 600-1800 estimate.

The genres listed are the highly specific ones Spotify uses. You can look yourself up at Every Noise at Once to see where you fit in.

Color Theory lies on the outskirts of neo-synthpop. Popwave and chillwave are familiar and appropriate, but the last two genres listed are new to me: dresden indie and indie veneto. A Spotify search reveals personalized playlists for both.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, we’ve got graphs:

You can see consistent follower growth, a rising average popularity score, and a consistent number of tracks. I keep it at 200, adding each week’s new releases at the top.

artist.tools makes it easy to contact playlist curators with a pre-filled email. Just copy/paste your song link and click send! Much to my chagrin, they even have my correct email address.

In my case, that effort would be in vain because I only accept submissions at SubmitHub here. Soon artist.tools will allow curators to set a preferred submission method with direct links to submit on SubmitHub, Groover, and SubmitLink.

Since I own the playlist, I’ve got some track management tools at my disposal:

I can also see where my playlist ranks in search for particular keywords. For “synthwave,” not very well!

artist.tools search

So let’s say I want to find playlists in my genre to pitch to. By default, artist.tools is optimized to exclude bad playlists.

Here’s a search for “synthwave” playlists with at least 1000 followers and 10 listeners:

By default it only includes playlists with contact info, but I’m a resourceful guy and don’t mind doing the legwork.

I’m spotting some fresh blood among the usual suspects:

I don’t know what phonk is, but odds are I’m not making it! I’m a little skeptical of the playlist getting exactly 117 followers a day for a week, but looking at the tracks, I suppose it doesn’t matter anyway:

There are way too many vowels in my artist name to even be considered. Maybe if I rebranded as KLLR Thyry?

On second thought, limiting my search to playlists with contact info makes sense. Otherwise the results include Spotify editorial playlists, the official Stranger Things playlist of songs actually in the show, and others that I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting added to.

You can of course paste a link to any playlist in the search bar. Problem is, if it’s the first time a playlist has been searched for, there won’t be any historical data.

Here’s my buddy XENNON’s playlist:

And here’s what one day of data looks like:

You wouldn’t know that he’s been curating the playlist for years and accepts submissions at SubmitHub.

I suppose that’s the nature of the beast. You can’t expect the site to maintain historical data on every playlist. It’s the same with Chartmetric.

artist.tools artist analysis

artist.tools tracks your popularity score as an artist, the popularity scores of all your tracks, your follower history, and more. Most importantly, it tracks what playlists you’re in and will alert you if any of them are sketchy.

I’d share more screenshots, but they’ll soon be obsolete. In fact, the entire monitoring feature is being re-coded from scratch.

My initial plan for this post was to detail my playlisting campaign over the course of several weeks. The “problem” is…

Every time I visit, I have a long chat conversation with founder Aaron Whittington. Any bugs I point out are immediately squashed and suggestions are implemented in days.

For example, I shared a preview of this post. Now Spotify-owned playlists are hidden by default, I assume in response to my screenshot at the top of the search section above.

You can now also more easily see and remove the filters you’ve added:

The point is, the screenshots I took earlier this week are now obsolete, and I’m too lazy to keep rewriting this post. If you want to know what the site looks like today, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.

And if you spot anything that could be improved, let Aaron know!

artist.tools conclusion

artist.tools is a one-stop shop for everything related to Spotify playlists. It’s the best playlist research site I’ve tested.

I considered doing a feature comparison between artist.tools and Chartmetric, but it would be inaccurate tomorrow. I’ll just say that a few months ago, I purchased an annual subscription to Chartmetric and never used it. To their credit, they were kind enough to give me a prorated refund!

artist.tools offers 7 days of historical data for free and full access for $15.

You can get 10% off forever with my affiliate link. When you sign up, I’ll receive a small commission which will go towards further experiments. Thank you!

Have you tried artist.tools? How do you research Spotify playlists? Share your thoughts and strategies in the comments!