In October 2020, I released two new tracks “Let’s Go Back” & “Stuck” – they were probably both my favorite songs that I’d recorded and I wanted them to go far.
I decided to take advantage of this opportunity to test several different promotion services, along with my own small amount of daily Instagram stories & Facebook ads. First I tried Submithub and Droptrack (with mixed results, which I’ll share in another post), and a couple weeks later I decided to give Playlist Push an honest shot.
Going into it, my expectations were low, which is why it was my final promotion service to test out. I honestly never seriously considered it before. I’d read a few things about how it was a scam, all the listeners were bots, they take your money even if you don’t get onto any playlists, etc. Basically just a few negative reviews and bad experiences.
However, one night I came across a very intriguing post in Reddit about someone’s more recent experience with PlaylistPush. It was so different from everything else I’d heard and read, and it was very positive. He (or she) described their campaign in 2020 as a vastly different experience from what others had gone through in previous years.
In a nutshell, PlaylistPush has been working for some time on ‘cleaning up house’ – getting rid of scammy playlist curators & bot-driven playlists. Based on this post, I decided to set up a $500 campaign for both of my new tracks and see how it goes. Now, I’m excited to tell you about the results and how it was so much better than what I expected.
Playlist Push Discount Link
Before I get into the details, if you decide to try out PlaylistPush for yourself, feel free to use the following link:
https://playlistpush.com/?ref=8gsdv
You can also use the following code to get 7.5% off: 2KTLDDV
The above link and discount code will help support this website, so I appreciate you using them if you decide to try out Playlist Push. I regard myself as an honest person with integrity, so I do my best to write this review with as little bias as possible.
What Are the Cons of Using PlaylistPush?
It’s Relatively Expensive
Once your song is approved by someone at PlaylistPush, you will go through a small questionnaire to help them understand your song (genres, similar artists – I’d recommend spending some quality time to get this right!) And then you’ll see the cost of your campaign with a slider based on how many curators will hear your songs and how many playlists they own.
At first, when you see the cost amounts they seem pretty large. For myself, it was mainly because I was comparing it to the cost per curator on SubmitHub. It made me hesitant and I almost didn’t finish the process – as a matter of fact, I even exited out of the page and let myself marinate on it for a couple of days. In the end, I really just believed in my music enough to give it a good shot, and submitted the campaign.
What are the Pros of Using Playlist Push?
Pro #1: Quality
The quality of PlaylistPush was much higher than what I expected, as well as compared to what I experienced with SubmitHub (check out my full review of SubmitHub here) & Droptrack. I think that’s partly because the price is a bit more expensive. As much as that’s a downside to us indie artists, when curators are getting paid more to review your songs, they’re more likely to give your song a real listen.
In other promotion services I’d used in the past, I got tons of streams, BUT they were not going to the right audience. This completely ruined my algorithm chances on Spotify and even ruined my “Fans also like” section on Spotify. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to avoid those cheaper services, even if there’s just the slightest risk of the quality being low.
It’s much better to get smaller exposure and be confident that your music is going to be on fitting playlists with the correct audience. For myself and my music that means I want to be on playlists with other artists like Jon Bellion, Jeremy Zucker, John Mayer, etc. NOT on playlists for random movie soundtracks or with a bunch of artists in different genres that don’t make sense for what I’m putting out into the world.
When I look at the playlists I was added to with Playlist Push, they all made sense – “Chill Pop Love Songs”, “Sad Songs 2020”, “Mood : Sad”, “Chill Pop Playlist”. And what confirmed to me that the quality was high was the save-to-listeners ration. My song was being saved by every 4-5 listeners, which is right where you want to be, and in my opinion a really solid stat during a promotion campaign.
Pro #2: Time Savings
In addition to the higher quality, Playlist Push saved me hours from pouring through curators & playlists, to decide which ones to submit to. It’s a much more streamlined process, which is nice. I’ll get into my experiences with SubmitHub & Droptrack in separate views, but I spent a TON of time with both those platforms picking curators and sending them in one-by-one. I thought that would be worth it, because when you breakdown the cost per submission it’s much lower… looking back now I’m not confident that’s still the case.
Here’s why I say that… with Playlist Push, I was able to send my song to about 60 playlist curators for close to $500. That comes out to about $8 per submission. That cost is pretty high, but when I look back on my results, it was much better with PlaylistPush. I was getting accepted by more than 50% of curators, as opposed to the Submithub average acceptance rate closer to 5-10%. My running theory for this is partly that because they get paid better with PlaylistPush they gave the song a better listen and fighting chance. I’m sure they also feel a bit more internal pressure to accept songs when they’re not getting paid abysmally for it.
My Own Results
Mainly for transparency sake, as well as to give you a full glimpse of what I saw happen with my song “Let’s Go Back” I’ll paste a screenshot of the results (directly from Playlist Push) below:
For myself personally, comparing to the other promotion strategies I’ve used in the past, this was pretty successful. Worth calling out however, they’re taking a lot of this data as a whole. So if I was running other campaigns or services at the exact same time there’s no real way to know which is driving the results. Luckily, at the time, I wasn’t really using any other promotional service other than my own small amount of daily Facebook & Instagram Story ads.
What Does The Data Say?
When I look at this data, the most compelling piece is the number of saves. Let’s do some quick back-of-the-envelope math… 19k (the number of listeners I had) divided by 4k (the number of saves my song received) comes out to 4.75. That means for every 5 listeners, 1 one of them would save the song – from what I understand they either downloaded it or added it to one of their personal playlists. That’s pretty sweet!
In terms of the alternative Spotify playlisting services out there, go run a $500 campaign with a pay-for-play type service and see how that goes… I’ll tell you from personal experience (just once that I’m pretty embarrassed I even tried it), it may not go all that well and definitely won’t be worth it in the long run. You may get hundreds of thousands of streams, but I’d be surprised if you didn’t get barely any saves, or at least a way lower ratio than you normally have.
So let me tell you real quick why that ratio of saves-to-listeners matters so much. Spotify will use that number to gauge how much your listeners like your song. It makes sense, right? If you love a song that you hear for the first time, you save it or you add it to a playlist. If you blow right past it or quickly skip to the next song, you probably didn’t love it all that much. More than driving a ton of streams, I want to prove to Spotify that people love my music. With this ratio as proof, I should see the algorithm & radio streams slowly start to move up.
The only disappointing thing I see in the data is the number of editorial playlists. I would have liked to see all the streams, listeners, & saves, help get my song noticed by a Spotify editorial playlist curator, but it just didn’t happen. Why it didn’t happen? I have no idea – could have been Spotify employees are just drowning in submissions, could have been that the data wasn’t quite good enough, maybe my growth was too abrupt. Most likely, this is helping me get there, but it’s a little farther down the line for me.
Would I Use PlaylistPush Again?
For myself personally, that answer is a definite “yes”. With my next releases, I actually plan to invest more money into my PlaylistPush submissions right when they drop. I’ve learned enough to know from this experience that it’s mostly hitting the right target audience, and it’s worth the investment.
That being said, I don’t want to come across as overly optimistic or biased. For me, it was a great experience. For others, it might not be the same. Maybe it’s a better experience for myself because I’m an alt-pop singer-songwriter. If I was releasing a more unique genre it would be very interesting to see how the results compare.
When it comes down to it, even with the comparisons, pros, and cons, there are some solid playlist curators on all the main platforms (PlaylistPush, SubmitHub, & SoundCampaign). Based on everything I’ve outlined in this article, I plan to invest more heavily in PlaylistPush for every release, and then also do a small amount into both SubmitHub & SoundCampaign.
PlaylistPush Discount Code
If you decide to try out PlaylistPush for yourself, feel free to use the following link:
https://playlistpush.com/?ref=8gsdv
You can also use the following code to get 7.5% off: 2KTLDDV
The above link and discount code will help support this website, so I appreciate you using them if you decide to try out Playlist Push.
Update: I loved the experience so much that I’m now a playlist curator for Playlist Push myself. Are you by chance a playlist curator or do you have more than 1000 followers on a single playlist? I’ll be working on a review of PlaylistPush from the view of a curator, but in the mean time if you’d like to try it out, go ahead and use this link: https://app.playlistpush.com/apply/creator/spotify?ref=8gsdv