Getting a song added to an editorial or algorithmic playlist on Spotify can help boost streams and lead to more fans discovering your music.
It’s well documented that in order to get on Spotify you need to submit your upcoming releases for editorial submission via either Spotify For Artists or Spotify Analytics.
But how do you get on the popular algorithmic playlists like Release Radar and Discover Weekly? The answer — in part at least — is to have great save rates.
So what is a Spotify save rate? The save rate is the number of times somebody saves a song to their Spotify library divided by total number of listeners (a save is defined by Spotify as when a user saves a song to their library or adds it to one of their own playlists btw).
So in the Spotify for Artists dashboard screenshot above, 258.6K listeners have saved a particular song 25.3k times. If you divide saves by listeners (25.3k / 258.6k) then multiply by 100 you get a save rate of 9.78%.
What makes a good save rate? Spotify doesn’t publish guidelines but I’ll make an informed assumption: During my years of studying stats for hundreds of artists I typically see save rates of between 3% to 7% on average.
So anything above 10% is “good” — which seems to be supported by singer-songwriter Steve Benjamins, who posted this excellent blog post on how he earns $400 a month from Discover Weekly playlists. The songs with the highest save rates get featured in Discover Weekly most.
How as an artist do you get good save rates? Apart from releasing brilliant music that people love so much that they want to save it, I recommend using a pre-save tool (as I have written about before) which makes it easy for your fans to add your music to their library and hence increase your save rates.
Finally, there is one big caveat to this article: nobody knows exactly how to get your music featured on algorithmic Spotify playlists.
Using anecdotal evidence we can presume that having healthy save rates is a factor but we also hear that other factors contribute towards the algorithms “liking” your music:
- Having low skip rates
- Getting playlisted on independent playlists
- People sharing your music on social networks
- Having a strong following of fans on Spotify
In short, do it all, there are no short cuts!
UK-based Kieron Donoghue is an ex-warner Music exec, the founder of Topsify, Playlists.net, Artists To Watch Records and Humble Angel Records. He blogs here.
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