In Spotify, there’s an option to keep playing related music even if your playlist already ended. The same goes for artist and song radio, where if you’ve played all songs in the list, it will keep playing songs that their algorithm thinks are related to it.
Now, Spotify is letting artists hack into this algorithm by letting them choose which songs to promote. It may be an album’s anniversary, a new song, a song that got featured in a film, or gets used in TikTok- whatever the case, they can choose to promote it and Spotify will try to insert that in relevant plays.
The caveat is, there’s a “promotional recording royalty rate” for your song which The Verge says is lower than their standard rate. Musicgateway estimates that for your song to make a dollar, it needs to do 250 streams so to earn that during the promotional period means your song has to do a lot more. The thing is, Spotify focuses on listeners first so if your song doesn’t perform well, they’ll be pulled back quickly.
As if that’s not bad enough, Spotify says they won’t guarantee placement to labels and artists, so your song can be in that promotional rate but not get significant traction.
Spotify might think that decreasing royalties is a small trade-off in getting more streams but ask yourself, when’s the last time you heard something new in Spotify that you really liked? I personally haven’t experienced one. Most of the songs I discover are already popular, just in a different genre like Doja Cat’s ‘Say So’. Most of the real discoveries happen in another platform like Facebook, TikTok, films, and YouTube. After hearing it, that’s when I searched for them in Spotify. I seriously can’t remember a song with a few streams being recommended to me. But let’s see if this can really change things or what Spotify will do in-case this move turns out to be a bust.
