How to Get on Spotify Playlists
Learning how to get on Spotify playlists can expose your music to thousands of listeners. But not all Spotify playlists strategies are created equal, and some methods for getting on Spotify playlists can actually hurt your artist profile more than they help.
Some approaches to get on Spotify playlists build real fans who save your music and come back month after month. Others generate temporary spikes in streams from passive listeners who disappear the moment you’re removed from the playlist. Worse, some methods risk exposing your account to bot traffic that could get your music flagged by Spotify.
This step by step guide breaks down seven ways to get your music on Spotify playlists—from editorial playlists curated by Spotify’s editorial teams to algorithmic playlists that reach millions—and explains what works, what doesn’t, and why certain methods are worth your time while others aren’t.
Key Takeaways:
- Submit your unreleased song to editorial playlists through Spotify for Artists—the pitching process is free, takes minutes, and editorial teams have added countless independent artists to curated playlists
- Build your own playlist featuring only your song catalog, then promote it to get your music heard by passive listeners who stream multiple tracks and become real fans
- Avoid paid music promotion services—they don’t guarantee placement, generate temporary spikes from passive listeners who don’t save your music, and you can’t verify if streams are real or bots
- Focus on triggering algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly by sending engaged fans who save your music and signal to Spotify that your songs deserve wider feature placement on personalized playlists
Editorial Playlists: Always Submit
Editorial playlists on Spotify are manually curated by editorial teams and editors at Spotify. There’s no guarantee placement, but the submission process is so simple that it’s worth doing for every upcoming release before your release date.
To submit and pitch your music, go into Spotify for Artists, click on Music, find your upcoming release, and pitch directly to the editorial team. With millions of songs in the submissions queue constantly, the chances of getting your music featured are slim. But playlist placement does happen—and it’s happened multiple times to independent artists in the music community who got noticed by Spotify’s editors.
The important thing is that it costs nothing and takes just a few minutes to pitch your song. Even if you never land a curated playlist placement and get your music featured, you’re not losing anything by trying.
When you submit to editorial playlists, you’re also automatically submitting for Release Radar, which brings us to the next method.
Release Radar: Submit Every Release
Release Radar is a personalized playlist that Spotify creates algorithmically for fans who follow you or have engaged with your music. These personalized playlists help listeners discover new music from artists they already know, making it one of the most valuable algorithmic playlists for connecting with existing fans.
From the day of your release, one song from your new music release is eligible for Release Radar for a four-week window. That means you could appear in four weekly Release Radar cycles that refresh every Friday, reaching new listeners each week.
Release Radar will only feature one song at a time from your release. If you release a single with one song, that’s simple. But if you release an EP or album with multiple tracks, you need to pick which song goes to Release Radar. When you submit to editorial playlists through Spotify for Artists, you’re selecting that song for Release Radar. If you don’t submit to editorial playlists, you can still get on Release Radar—Spotify will just pick the song for you instead of you choosing it.
Paid Playlist Promotion: Why It’s Not Worth It
There’s an entire industry of music promotion services that charge artists to place songs on their playlist networks. These services don’t guarantee placement on quality playlists, and even when they do deliver, there are two major problems. (For a deeper comparison of promotion methods, check out free music promotion vs music campaigns: what actually works.)
First, playlists are consumed by passive listeners—people driving, working out, or sitting in coffee shops with music in the background. They’re not paying attention to individual tracks or artists. As an artist, you get listener counts and streams, but you’re not building a real fanbase.
You can see this in Spotify for Artists. When your song gets added to a third-party playlist, listeners and streams jump up. When it’s removed, the vast majority of those listeners disappear. You drop back close to where you were before—because most of these listeners were never engaged with your music in the first place.
Second, it’s extremely hard to tell whether listeners from third-party playlists are real or bots. With Spotify cracking down on bot streams, this risk isn’t worth taking for any song in your catalog. If you want to learn how to do Spotify playlist promotion right, focus on building your own playlists instead.
Playlist Marketplaces: More Transparent but Same Issues
Platforms like SubmitHub and Groover act as middlemen between playlist curators and artists. You submit to specific curators, pick playlists that match your genre, and get feedback on whether your song fits.
This is more transparent than many other paid playlist promotion services—curators provide direct feedback. But the fundamental challenges remain: you get on a playlist, results go up. You come off that playlist, results drop. And you still can’t verify if traffic is real or bots.
Submitting to Curators Directly: Time-Intensive
Search for playlists in your genre on Spotify and you’ll find many playlist curators include contact info in their descriptions. You can email curators directly to pitch your music and ask about adding your song to playlists in specific genres.
The advantage: it’s free. The disadvantage: it’s time-intensive with no guaranteed results. You spend hours researching playlists, emailing playlist curators, and following up, and you might not land any placements.
Building Your Own Playlist: This Actually Works
Here’s where playlist strategy gets interesting. The disadvantage of being one song among many in a playlist—where listeners go from track to track without noticing individual artists—becomes a massive advantage when you create and build a playlist with only your music.
Now, even a passive listener going through 10 or 20 of your tracks generates amazing results on Spotify because you’re getting multiple streams per listener. This is one of the most effective ways to get your music heard while building a real audience. (You can even grow your Spotify streams without getting on any playlists by using this strategy.)
Create a playlist called “This Is [Your Name]” or “[Your Name] Essentials” or “Best of [Your Name].” It doesn’t matter what you call it. The key is that it features only your music—but not necessarily all of it. Include your best songs, the tracks that represent your current sound and quality. If you have older releases that don’t fit your style anymore, leave them off. You want your strongest material showcasing who you are as an artist right now.
Then make this playlist your number one destination when you promote your music. Instead of sending people to a single track, send them to your playlist where they can discover multiple songs from your catalog.
The most effective way to promote this playlist is with Facebook and Instagram ads. You can target a captive audience of listeners who love your genre, bring them over to your playlist, and they’re very likely to stream multiple tracks and become fans of your work.
The challenge? Setting up music ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram can be technically complicated. You need to understand audience targeting, creative optimization, campaign structure, and conversion tracking. Most artists spend weeks trying to figure it out, and many give up before they see good enough results.
This is exactly why Hypeddit created AI-powered ad templates that put the entire process on autopilot. Instead of spending weeks learning Meta’s ad platform, you can launch a campaign in minutes using proven templates designed specifically for growing Spotify listeners. Hypeddit handles the technical complexity—audience targeting, creative generation, campaign optimization—while you focus on your music.
This works phenomenally well. It generates high engagement, builds real fans, and gives you full control over the experience. You’re not dependent on external playlist curators. You’re not hoping someone adds you. You’re building your own audience on your own terms.
Algorithmic Playlists: The Biggest Opportunity
Spotify Radio, Discover Weekly, and other algorithmic playlists are some of the biggest contributors to listeners and streams for independent artists in the music industry. For many artists in the music community, including John from Hypeddit, these algorithmic sources deliver more listeners than any other channel or playlist around the world.
The best part? You don’t have to submit your music anywhere. There’s no pitching process. As long as your music is on the Spotify platform and generating positive signals to the algorithm, you have a great shot at getting featured on algorithmic playlists.
What are positive signals? Spotify wants to keep listeners on their platform. Their competitive advantage in the music industry is a music recommendation system that keeps people engaged by helping them discover songs they love.
To make this work, Spotify needs to understand listener habits. You can train Spotify on who likes your music by promoting in a way that sends fans who are very likely to repeat stream your music, save it to their library, add it to playlists, or follow you as an artist. (Learn more about how to crack the Spotify algorithm and get on Discover Weekly with the right engagement signals.)
All of these actions signal to Spotify: “This kind of listener loves this artist’s music.” Then Spotify shows your music to more people who fit that profile through Discover Weekly and other algorithmic playlists.
The most effective way to do this is with Facebook and Instagram ads. You can laser-target an audience that already loves your style and sound, then bring them over to Spotify to discover you as a new artist. Once they engage with your music, Spotify’s algorithm takes over and starts featuring your songs to even more people.
But here’s the key: you need smart links that track exactly where your traffic comes from and what actions people take. Hypeddit’s smart links act as conversion-optimized landing pages that funnel ad traffic to Spotify while capturing data on who follows you, who saves your songs, and which campaigns are working. This tracking is essential for understanding what triggers the algorithm and scaling what works.
This is the easiest, fastest, and most effective way to promote music and trigger algorithmic playlists. Instead of chasing external curators or paying for temporary playlist placements, you’re building real engagement that compounds over time.
What Actually Works: Build Real Engagement (In More Detail)
The methods that work build real engagement with real fans and help you get your music heard on Spotify playlists:
Worth your time: Editorial playlist submissions through Spotify for Artists (free, fast), Release Radar (automatic), building and promoting your own playlist with ads, triggering algorithmic playlists
Avoid: Paid playlist promotion services (passive listeners, potential bots), playlist marketplaces (same problems), direct curator outreach (time-intensive, uncertain placement)
The difference is control and predictability. When you create your own playlist and promote with ads in your own ad account, you control the experience, see exactly where your money goes, and track real-time engagement. When you pay third-party services, you’re giving money to someone else who does who-knows-what with it.
Most importantly, you’re building an asset that compounds. Fans who follow your playlist become recurring listeners. Every save feeds Spotify’s algorithm, increasing your chances of Discover Weekly feature placement and getting your music heard.
Playlist placements spike and fade. Engaged fans compound and grow.
Ready to get started? Try Hypeddit’s AI-powered ad campaigns to launch your first music promotion in minutes. Create smart links that track every click, set up conversion-optimized landing pages, and use proven ad templates that handle targeting and creative for you. Start building real fans who actually save your music—not temporary playlist spikes that disappear.