Spotify’s own playlists—Rap Caviar, for instance—are important vehicles for artists seeking to increase their audience. The popular playlists are always created by an in-house editorial team made up of music lovers, but Spotify announced today a new avenue for artists and labels who want to submit new music for playlist consideration.
Billboard reports that Spotify launched a beta feature on Wednesday that will allow content owners to send unreleased tracks to editors, creating “unprecedented, efficient, and easy access to Spotify’s entire global editorial team,” per a company statement.
“The number one question we get from labels, artists, and their teams is: who do I speak to to get on Rap Caviar, Hot Country, ¡Viva Latino!, Ultimate Indie or other Spotify playlists?,” Nick Holmsten, Vice President of Content & Global Head of Shows & Editorial at the company, said. “We’ve listened to feedback from the creative community and developed a new feature that enables them to easily submit unreleased music for playlist consideration to our entire worldwide team of playlist editors.”
The new feature will allow artists or label reps with access to a Spotify for Artists or a Spotify Analytics account to log on and submit an unreleased track and send it to the streaming platform's team. As Variety explains, senders can include information about the track—like genre or mood, whether it’s a cover, or which culture the song belongs to—that will be considered by the team. Spotify will then cross-reference this information with data it already stores on the artist in question, like what other playlists they might appear on or what kinds of music their fans tend to listen to, in an attempt to make an informed decision about how and where to spotlight the song.
Spotify is interested in diversifying the ways artists can share new music, and not the process by which this music is considered by the editorial team. Their announcement stresses that “no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists” and that editors choose tracks considering “data about what’s resonating most with their community of listeners.”
