Wednesday, Jul 6, 2022 • 1h, 30min

The Spotify Interview (Part 1)

The New Music Business with Ari Herstand
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Joining us this week is Sam Duboff, the Director and Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing at Spotify! In this episode, Ari and Sam dive deep into everything about Spotify for Artists’ promotional tools, editorial vs. algorithmic playlists, production credits, payment structure, and much more. Visit Spotify's resources here: Spotify for Artists: https://artists.spotify.com/ Made to Be Found: https://found.byspotify.com Loud & Clear: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com 03:40 Welcome 06:52 Using Spotify for Artists 09:08 Shopify integration 10:49 Canvas 16:23 Promotional tools and editorial playlists 25:48 Pitching to Spotify editorials 26:46 Is pre-saving worthwhile? 30:00 Turning a listener into a fan 34:54 Promotional tools and editorial playlists (continued) 38:28 Do major labels artists get guaranteed playlist inclusion? 42:37 How many songs get uploaded to Spotify everyday? 43:41 Algorithmic playlists and how to stay on them 49:37 User playlists and Low Volume Funk 52:13 Playlist inclusion vs. consideration 1:02:30 The royalty pool 1:06:33 User-centric payment model 1:10:36 Enhancing song credits 1:13:52 Marquee’s promotional tools and measuring ROI 1:23:17 Discovery Mode 1:28:21 Final question Subscribe to The New Music Business: https://aristake.com/nmb Ari's Take Academy (use code NMB for 10% off): https://aristakeacademy.com Watch more discussions like this: https://bit.ly/3LavMpa Connect with Ari’s Take: Website: https://aristake.com Academy: https://aristakeacademy.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aristake_ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@aris.take Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArisTake YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aristake1 Connect with Ari Herstand: Website: https://ariherstand.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ariherstand Twitter: https://twitter.com/ariherstand YouTube: https://youtube.com/ariherstand Connect with Sam Duboff: Website: https://www.samduboff.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/sduboff LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/samduboff Twitter: https://twitter.com/duboff Edited and mixed by Maxton Hunter Music by Brassroots District Produced by the team at Ari’s Take Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Speakers
(2)
Sam Duboff
Ari Herstand
Transcript
Verified
Ari Herstand
00:00
What's going on. Welcome to the new music business. I'm your host,
Ari Herstand
and author of How To Make It In The New Music Business, The Book, third edition coming very soon. Today is my interview with
Spotify
specifically Sam Duboff. He is the director and the head of creator branded product marketing at
Spotify
.
Share
00:24
He's on the
Spotify
for Artists team. So he is working on the tools and the products day in and day out for artists directly. Now this episode we cover everything from
Spotify
Editorial. How do you get your songs on
Spotify
playlist? Official ones algorithmic playlist. We discuss all about what those are, how to get on them, how to stay on them, what the editors are looking for.
Share
00:45
We talk about the third party playlist and services. What
Spotify
thinks about those we talk about is press important. We talk about fraudulent and artificial streams and how to prevent those and what are bots streams and how that all works.
Share
00:56
We talk about getting in touch with your fans and all the tools that are there or not there. We discuss credits of course and uh what
Spotify
is doing about the whole credit situation. So we touch on a lot of the topics that I know you're interested in because how do I know this?
Share
01:14
Well I posted on
Twitter
and
Instagram
letting you know if you follow me there that I was interviewing
Spotify
and asked you what to ask them. So I took detailed notes and I checked off, I had a checklist in front of me and I checked out all the questions that you asked me to ask and I think I got through all of them.
Share
01:30
So which brings me to, if you're not following me on
Instagram
or
Twitter
you should because uh I regularly ask you what I should ask my upcoming guests there. Now this is a long interview and I would really encourage you to listen to the entire thing start to finish. Yes, it's longer than most, but come on
Spotify
, this is the
Spotify
interview.
Share
01:48
So if you have to break it up into a few installments by all means do it. I really encourage you to listen to the end. You're gonna get a lot of great tips. Where else do you get to hear directly from the horse's mouth, directly from
Spotify
directly on how you can be more successful and succeed on
Spotify
.
Share
02:05
Now, what we did not get into in this episode is the nuances of how the
royalties
are broken down. That would take far too long. Now we did talk about payment, we talked about different various payment models and we did talk about what
Spotify
thinks about how their payment structure works and labels and distributors get paid more or less or any of that stuff.
Share
02:24
So we do cover it on the macro sense, but if you want to know the nitty gritty, the nuances of how songwriters are getting paid and how that works and if they're being paid enough and all of that. I actually did a full episode on this.
Share
02:35
It's called should artist boycott
Spotify
and go listen to that because I break down the royalty issue and how
royalties
work very explicitly on that episode. I believe it was back in february. So you can just search for that episode if you want to know I dedicated and devoted the entire episode to how
royalties
work on
Spotify
and all of that. All right as always, please follow the show.
Share
02:59
If your is this your first time listening. Well, give us a follow. Give us a like, subscribe to this podcast, however you're listening to it, please give us a five star review on
Spotify
and
Apple
podcast. However you're listening right now. Those really help. If you're listening on Youtube, give us a comment.
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03:12
I love reading those comments and give us a thumbs up. You can follow everyone that makes the show happen at Ari's take on
Tiktok
,
Twitter
and
Instagram
. You can find me at Ari her stand on
Instagram
and
Twitter
visit artistic dot com. Get on that email list that we're gonna get the most up to date information about the new music business.
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03:30
We send out regular emails, they're all things new music business, practical tips, Everything that you need. Stay up to date Artistic dot com. Get on that email list. Alright, let's kick it in the show.
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03:41
This episode is brought to you by Bandzoogle from garage bands to Grammy winners bands. Google powers the websites for tens of thousands of musicians around the world. I can tell you firsthand Bandzoogle is awesome. I've been using them for years. I've built many, many websites on Bandzoogle, it's super simple. You don't need any coding knowledge, graphic design knowledge.
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04:07
I'm actually a really terrible graphic design artist. I'd like to think I'm okay. I'm decent. I have Photoshop and you know, I've designed my fair share of show posters over the years. I should not have, I'm not a good graphic design artist. I know my strengths and weaknesses anyway, Bandzoogle. You don't need any of that.
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04:24
You can be a horrible graphic design artist like me, you don't need any Cody knowledge. I know very, very, very basic. Html that I learned about 15 years ago. I can still design kick ass websites on bands ago. They also have a bunch of other cool features, like a way to create an E P K.
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04:43
You can host and create your custom domain name. There's tools to sell your music and merch. It's all commission free. There's a mailing list, there's social media integrations, They have a crowdfunding feature, which is very new and very cool. They have a subscription service kind of like, Patreon also, all commission free.
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05:07
If you want to try out Bandzoogle you can go to Bandzoogle.com. Use the Code Ari. That's just a ri my name. Ari For 15% off the first year of any subscription but you get a 30 day free trial to just give it a go try it out.
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05:29
Sam Duboff welcome to the show.
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Sam Duboff
05:32
Happy to be here.
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Ari Herstand
05:32
Yeah, I am very excited for this one today. You know when I told my audience that I was interviewing
Spotify
on the show, as you can imagine, I was like so what questions do you have and then that was the famous last words that my inbox will never recover from that, that request.
Share
05:55
Alright, fantastic. So I have a bunch here waiting for you but first before we get into all that tell me what you do at
Spotify
.
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Sam Duboff
06:02
Yeah, definitely. I've been a
Spotify
about 3.5 years and I lead our product marketing team for
Spotify
for Artists. So we are the team that is helping to build, develop market all the
Spotify
for Artists tools over a million artists use a month That is products for artists and songwriters, labels, managers, producers kind of across the ecosystem.
Share
06:32
So a lot of our work is kind of making sure artists get the most out of
Spotify
and
Spotify
for Artists. And then we also do a lot of kind of educational initiatives to help explain the music industry, how it works and answer questions from artists kind of on behalf of
Spotify
for Artists as well.
Share
Ari Herstand
06:48
Amazing. And for those of you listening who have not explored
Spotify
for Artists Artists dot
Spotify
dot com go sign up if you haven't it's the it's the back end kind of analytics platforms where you can see kind of real time stats of how your streams are doing, what playlists you've been added to, uh you know, your follower growth, all of that stuff and just were top countries, top cities, all of that stuff.
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Sam Duboff
07:13
Yeah. You know, when I when I started, we were really uh primarily focused on on analytics and there's still a ton of artists use this for primarily, but we've really been adding a ton of new features in there to go even beyond analytics.
Share
07:27
We want to be the best place for artists to build a fan base. So there's promotional tools, you can add canvases, you can now we're testing kind of live artist rooms where you can schedule kind of live audio rooms with their biggest fans.
Share
Ari Herstand
07:45
You will you won't call it that I can call it that. It's kind of like the new. Right, right. I took a look at it and it used to be called Green Room. I know, and now it's yeah, that's that's the hot new thing right now.
Share
07:55
It's like the so you don't have to be camera ready, it's like who wants to keep, you know, I think we're so Zoom fatigued at this point. It's like yeah, that's why
Twitter
spaces took off and you know, clubhouse took over the pandemic and it's great to see that
Spotify
live is coming, it's not quite rolled out to everybody yet, is that correct?
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Sam Duboff
08:11
Spotify
Live? Is anyone can download that from the app store? The part we've been working on is we've been testing with a few dozen artists live live artist rooms, so we'll get your biggest music fans from
Spotify
in the room with you.
Share
08:25
You can kind of upload a shop tab where you can put, you know, your merch ticket links, collect tips, uh and we get your biggest fans there through fans first program in there for you. So that part's in limited testing, but anyone can go in and download
Spotify
live now.
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Ari Herstand
08:41
So talk some a little bit more about the features other than the analytics, which I think, you know,
Spotify
for Artists got known for initially because it is fantastic to be able to log in and see those real-time analytics. It's much more robust than any of the other distributors. I mean, I, You know, I've studied 17 uh, distributors, I have a report, you know, comparing all of them.
Share
09:03
Like I've done details on all the distribution platforms and done the back end and like, you know, it's nice to be able to go direct to
Spotify
for Artists and see all of that info there and I, you know, use it regularly for that, but talk to some of the other features, like you said, some fan engagement tools in ways that artists can use it to help their careers out.
Share
Sam Duboff
09:21
That's awesome to hear. Yeah, the stats are awesome, the one we always get, the best feedback, about is you can open the app anytime and see how many listeners around the world are listening to you at that exact moment, which is pretty awesome, that one that was always fun.
Share
09:37
We've got a bunch of tools to help artists connect with fans so you can kind of overhaul your artist profile in an artistic, on the top artist playlist, get your merch there, get your tickets, their Canvas is super popular. You go into
Spotify
for Artists, go to any track and you can upload a 3 to 8 seconds, looping visual and people, you know, you've seen them on platform when you're playing the song kind of loop in the background.
Share
10:07
If a fan shares that
Instagram
or
Snapchat
, the Canvas will kind of carry on there too, so you kind of get that feedback loop, so lots of cool ways to connect with fans, and then we've got a bunch of promotional teachers to so you can pitch for free to our playlist editors.
Share
10:25
Over the past two years, 150,000 artists got play listed for the first time. Thanks to the playlist pitching tool, working on some new promotional tools to, we've got a product called Marquee that is a new release marketing tool.
Share
10:41
So you can kind of go in there when you have a new single ep or album going out by a campaign to target all different types of listeners based on
Spotify
listening history. Get direct reporting on how it drove streams. So you can anyone in the US can do that through
Spotify
for Artists to.
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Ari Herstand
10:57
Cool. And I've seen that I opened my
Spotify
app and instantly an album from a new artist that I follow pops up is like hey someone's got a new album out, you want to go check it out and I can just tap right through and go listen to that album. That's the Marquee feature you're talking about, right?
Share
11:12
So you mentioned a lot of these things and and a lot of these topics that you're you're you just touched on, we're going to dive deep into because the part of all my questions. So first off though let's talk merch because you mentioned merch. I have to say I am so appreciative and thankful that you switch to
Shopify
integration with
Spotify
merch because Merchbar was a fucking nightmare.
Share
11:36
I have to tell you like Merchbar, I don't I don't know who they are but I have emailed them through their contact form or whatever over the last five years probably a dozen times and be like hey guys uh you have an out of print CD listed for my merch. How can I change this?
Share
11:52
I literally have never received a response, I've never been able to change it. And on the merch on my
Spotify
profile with these two out of print CDs That literally you would click through and be like this is out of stock and it's like, "Yeah I only made 1000 of them like 10 years ago".
Share
12:07
Why are you even listening this? I don't even have this album on
Spotify
anymore because it was a live album from so many years ago. I was like it was such a nightmare. I was like eventually I just gave up and was like well there's gonna be some out of out of print CDs that you won't even be able to listen to the album on my merch store and that's it. So now you fix that. Thank you.
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Sam Duboff
12:26
Oh my gosh, I'm happy to hear it. Yeah awesome. They've been such good partners. Uh Yeah we uh we've been getting great feedback from them. So I'm glad to hear you've enjoyed it.
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Ari Herstand
12:38
It's really great, it's so seamless. I just honestly on with an artist that I managed right before we hopped on. I was like, "Oh we even put her, she's got a
Shopify
store going on. Let me just like you know plug it into Spot
Spotify
profile and like within five minutes it was up there was like oh that's easy. That's quick". Sweet, Amazing.
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Sam Duboff
12:55
Yeah.
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Ari Herstand
12:56
Okay, so merch is great, I appreciate that you switched that. It's very easy now to do uh the Canvas videos. And I think everybody knows what that is. If you use
Spotify
, like you said, you open, you play a song and you have the song full screen, that's that looping little video that's playing there.
Share
13:13
Do you have any data that says why artists should use Canvas videos? Because I have pushback from people be like, "I don't want a looping video, like I put a lot of time and thought into my album cover, into that single cover, the album cover. Like that's a that is part of my artwork, like why do I have to come up with like some dumb little seven second video that doesn't have anything to do with the song, I don't really know what to do here is just like". Tell me why somebody or should do Canvas.
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Sam Duboff
13:44
Yeah, lots of artists will kind of just keep their their track artwork up there and that's great if they do, there's several million canvases on platform now. And we kind of think of it as uh you know, album artwork for the streaming age rather than having that static image.
Share
14:03
You know, one of the things we've been trying to kind of improve about streaming is especially with playlisting sometimes every track and kind of look the same and artist missed that opportunity when listeners coming in through a playlist to really stand out, show who they are, show a bit of their vision behind the song and so Canvas give them a little bit more opportunity for, for creativity there to connect with a new fan, the listener might be cheering you on a playlist for the very first time they open their phone to see who you are and you get that chance to show something a bit richer.
Share
14:35
But yeah, we've, we've released them a bunch of data on Canvas and, the way we kind of look at it is, uh, we'll look at, comparing listeners who open their phone and see the Canvas, so it's not in their pocket actually look at the Canvas versus when they open their phone and look at it and it's just track artwork. So the Canvas isn't there.
Share
14:58
And on average, listeners, when there is a Canvas there, 5% more likely to keep streaming, 20% more likely to add you to a playlist, 9% more likely to visit your profile page.
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Ari Herstand
15:13
And if you have a Canvas vs if you have just a straight arwork.
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Sam Duboff
15:16
Exactly that if you have a Canvas and that's when they're looking at it, which is, which is awesome. And of course all those numbers, that's just on average. So it's got to be a good Canvas, you have to, You can't just kind of recut a music video where your lips are moving at the wrong time for the track on
Spotify
and assume you're going to get 20% lift and playlisting.
Share
15:37
What we see now is you know when artists are on set for a music video will do a bunch of takes that adjust for Canvas or when they hire a designer or illustrator to take on the track artwork, they'll get a bunch of canvases for their album there at the same time.
Share
15:55
And the social sharing is really cool too. So it really inspires fans to shared social if they shared an
Instagram
story to
Facebook
story,
Snapchat
, the Canvas goes with it. And then you know when you see that story it gets listeners to click right back and
Spotify
listen to your track. So yeah, definitely kind of highly recommend artists try it out.
Share
16:17
If you go to Canvas.spotify.com. We have a site where we kind of 100 of the best canvases in different styles to have inspired us. And you know sometimes it might be footage of the artist. Sometimes it's a really cool 2D or 3D animation artist has been super creative about it. Yeah, definitely check it out.
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Ari Herstand
16:36
Yeah. When I did my album photo shoot last year actually the photographer brought her assistant in his entire job was to shoot video in the locations of our photo shoot specifically for Canvas videos and that's that was what he came to do. And so it tied to the album. So we had a few, we're releasing, I think four singles and each single had its own, you know, single artwork.
Share
17:01
And so it actually, the Canvas video was very similar, it was almost like a motion. It was like a live action out track of artwork. So it was in that same location, same setting, same scene, same vibe except it was in motion. And so we have that and then when you tap the thing you'd see the single covers like, oh cool, this like really connection relates.
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Sam Duboff
17:21
I love that. One of the case studies, we love is with
Olivia Rodrigo's
team for
Drivers License
. Obviously, the like rise of that song is historic at this point, but, one kind of key part of what she did was coming up with kind of her own strategy for the Canvas.
Share
17:40
And so it's kind of, she said it was like Harry Potter inspired three
Drivers License
of our vertically, but on each one, her face is kind of animated in a different way.
Share
17:50
And first week of the song alone, it was shared to
Instagram
a quarter million times viewed, over 50 million times over that period. And so like it's just such a more compelling reason to, to share the song to social if you know, there's a really fun engaging video going with it. So yeah, definitely lots of artists using it. Pretty cool.
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Ari Herstand
18:12
Amazing. So now you mentioned promotional tools and you said that 150,000 artists have been play listed for the first time in the last few years. I think it's 2020 and 2021, the data for that. Amazing. We're gonna I want to talk about promotion. The number one question, as you can imagine that I got and that everyone's wondering is how do you get an official
Spotify
Editorial playlists?
Share
18:40
Let me tell you, I'm gonna give you a personal anecdote and this is going to just guide our discussion about this because like, you know. I'm an artist as well, I've listened and read... every video that you made for
Spotify
for Artists in every article you've written, I want you to know I've read and I've watched. So I like well done there, but it's yeah, but it's not for my lack of understanding on how all this works, so you know, tell me what I did wrong and tell me then what should be happening in the future, because I'm gonna just kind of like guide this a little bit.
Share
19:12
So let me set the scene. So I've been heard and I've read and I told, you know, uh I want to be releasing music regularly, let's warm up the, you know, warm up the algorithm, warm everything up. It's like, okay, cool, so I'm gonna release a song every six weeks.
Share
19:27
So I cued them all up and I as soon and I would distribute it at least five weeks in advance of the release date. So it gives my distributor some time to get it to
Spotify
. So it shows up in
Spotify
usually about a month before release date. So I'd go in right away into
Spotify
for Artists and I would pitch it. Now the pitch, let me tell you these are work of arts.
Share
19:48
I was like talking or I told you the story behind the song, you know, but I also did the promotional strategy. I hired a very expensive pr company. We got amazing press. You can see some of it behind me. I got a big, big profile in
American Songwriter Magazine,
Music Connection
.
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Sam Duboff
20:01
Beautiful press.
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Ari Herstand
20:02
Like warmed my heart, really stroke my ego. Really, really nicely. They said some really nice things about the album and about me and like, you know, that love the songs and there's just like beautiful reviews. It was amazing. So I like linked to some of them. Like, hey, like American songwriter wrote about this and did this.
Share
20:17
And you know, and let's just fast forward six months after I released, you know, four singles and advanced on the album, I pitched it every single time I had all this press. I did all of this. Guess how many official
Spotify
Editorial playlist I got?
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Sam Duboff
20:32
I don't know how much?
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Ari Herstand
20:34
It's zero, it's zero.
Share
20:35
So I'm so like I'm, you know, I feel, and believe me, I'm, you've seen my
Tiktok
videos, you've seen my, my articles like I'm a
Spotify
cheerleader. I'm like, you know what? I was, as soon as the
Spotify
launched, you can go back to my digital music news articles from 2013. Like I was the guy, you know, like fighting on behalf of streaming saying streaming is going to save the music industry, streaming is the future.
Share
21:01
Stop trying to fight this. Like this is, and it's streaming singlehandedly has brought the music industry back from the death spiral. It was in and you know, it's the reason that the music industry is profitable again.
Share
21:11
There's no argument there for me, but it's heartbreaking and soul crushing to like, the one thing that all of us are just trying to do is like trying to figure out like, what are you supposed to do to get on these coveted
Spotify
Detroit? I thought I did everything right? I'm telling you, man, I right? So like break this ship down for me. Like, what are we supposed to do?
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Sam Duboff
21:35
Let's get a first. Let me say that breaks my heart too, it sounds like you did everything right. It's uh, it's tough. I'll say, let's get into flight listing. We can kind of talk it through. I will say like playlisting is our editorial playlists are amazing. As a listener. I'm listening to them all the time. A good playlist placement. Can, you know, break a song make a career. Absolutely.
Share
21:56
Sometimes it becomes like, you know, such a singular focus for artists that, you know, they lose track of all the other ways that they are going to be able to get out there on
Spotify
. And so, you know, if you think of algorithmic playlist on
Spotify
,
Spotify
mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Radio and Autoplay a third of all new artist discoveries happen in those personalized algorithmic sessions.
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Ari Herstand
22:26
Just to clarify for people that don't know what algorithm platelets are. These are the ones that are not created by a human. This is not an editor at
Spotify
. This is the algorithm essentially making personalized playlists for each user.
Share
22:39
So my Discover Weekly playlist is going to look different from your Discover Weekly playlist because it's based on my listener habits. And they recommend the algorithm recommends songs to me that I've never heard that they think I might enjoy. And that's what you're saying a third of new artist discoveries happen from these personalized algorithmic playlists.
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Sam Duboff
22:54
That's right, right. And like the reason playlist is so important for artists is that discovery moment. Right? One of the key places listeners go to find the music, a ton of that happening in algorithmic playlist. And, you know, you can see and
Spotify
for Artists for every song for you as an artist.
Share
23:10
What percentage of your streams are coming from? You know those algorithmic placements but that's a ton, the majority of streaming on
Spotify
is what we call active streams.
Share
23:21
So that's you know, outside of
Spotify
programming and a listener listening to their own playlist, listening to their like songs going to a catalog page, like an AP or an album. So I say all of that first just you know, uh give heart artists who kind of want that playlist placement and it hasn't worked out yet.
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Ari Herstand
23:41
Don't get me wrong, I mean and that's that's great to hear and that's important, like there is some algorithmic action that happens in the back end and all of that stuff and like, you know, it's just it's tough for a lot of artists and I empathize and you know, I have that musicians empathy, I am an artist and I go through this personally. It's just like right when I was just like okay.
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23:59
And it's you know, 100,000 streams is very different when there's zero Editorial happening and so like, I don't know what my albums are now. It's not quite at a million Streams but hundreds of thousands of streams, it's just like... yeah with zero editorial and very little algorithm like oh those are real fans that are listening.
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24:18
So it's like it's nice but it's like yeah I'm not gonna get paid shit for that. So it's just like, "Okay cool, like my album is gonna take me at this rate probably you know, 27 years to kind of like recoup the cost that I put it to invest in it".
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24:29
So like I totally feel that and the algorithm is real. I talked to artists all the time who showed me their back end and they're like, yeah dude, I I'm getting three million streams a month just from Discover Weekly. And they show me this that that's dope. And these artists similarly are not any Editorial. So like, back to that. Like I totally get an algorithm is important too, totally.
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Sam Duboff
24:50
Yeah, let's get into editorial sounds like you were doing a lot of the best practices uh playlist pitching through
Spotify
for Artists definitely is key. You know, at least seventies, at least 70s is what we say. The ideal even two weeks in advance is even better, But at least seven days.
Share
25:10
That'll make sure whatever kind of if you're doing an ep or an album, if you choose a focus single through playlist pitching that will go on your followers Release Radar. If you do it at least seven days in advance, at least seven days will mean editors, hopefully we'll get to it two weeks even better.
Share
25:26
Definitely make sure your metadata is good. And then that pitch editors really are reading it. I was talking yesterday to our Head of Editorial, Selena who's amazing, has a massive team, she's running the team of global editors and just the day before she had been in our internal tool reading artist pitches, reciting them to be verbatim. Talking about music she discovered through it.
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25:49
So that they're really listening. And I think this data is you know, actually maybe a year or two old, but the last time we released data was about 20% of playlist pitches through
Spotify
for Artists were added to at least one playlist of some kind.
Share
26:05
And so yeah, in that pitch, you know, no need to detail like where you're touring or just publicity, get into the heart of the song. You know, the story behind you as an artist who are the collaborators who worked with, what's the song about the stuff editor should know. That might help them place it for the perfect audience.
Share
26:24
And you know, there's uh our flagship playlists, you know, Today's Top Hits and Rap Caviar and Hot Country are massive and really exciting. There's a whole ecosystem of playlists. Uh and the more context you give, the more an editor could know that you could be a fit on an Editorial workout playlist or a certain sub-genre or a certain type of influence.
Share
26:46
Our editors are really expert and immersed and well versed in their genre and the cultures that they're curating for and all the editors are, you know using the Editorial taste. Uh there's always going to be that human touch and then it's powered by
Spotify
data.
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Ari Herstand
27:03
Would you recommend? Sorry, go ahead.
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Sam Duboff
27:07
Oh yeah. You know, hopefully you got play listed on release date, but a lot of playlist adds happen post release. And that's when editors are, you know, looking through all the data, seeing, you know, just the type of stuff you're talking about.
Share
27:22
Real fans are coming streams for listener high people are adding this to their own playlist. Songs gaining momentum. And so sometimes it happens release day, but often playlist ads are happening, especially for the smaller playlists that can have a big impact, you know, weeks, even months, even years after.
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Ari Herstand
27:37
So let's talk about that for a second. I have a few questions with all of this, but it gives a lot of hope that if you don't get playlist on release day, that you could still get playlist. How does that happen? What is signaling to these editors to take a second look if they may have passed the first time around or that it didn't get to it because you can't re pitch a song once it's out.
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Sam Duboff
27:57
That's right, yeah, I mean it's all the usual stuff you'd be looking for any way to kind of build momentum on your track. They'll be looking at you know, did you get a massive release day and then streams are kind of going down or do you have a massive release day and people are saving it, They're adding it, they're coming back to listening to it.
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28:16
Our listeners sharing it a bunch. You know, if it has some playlist placements already, is the skip rate high, meaning it isn't working on that playlist and maybe it's not the right fit for that audience, or maybe it's, you know, being uh, you know, saved a ton by listeners and they're gonna move it even higher up the playlist.
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Ari Herstand
28:34
So the save rate, that's that's my next question. How important are pre-saves? I know that Spotify doesn't have a native way to actually do pre-saves, which is my follow-up question is are you going to have an in app way for artists to pre-safe? So you don't have to jump through 27 hoops when you try to go from
Instagram
and you have to log in 12 times. Get that, It's like a nightmare. But are you going to do an in app way to pre-save. And our pre is pre saving worthwhile, does it do anything?
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Sam Duboff
29:03
Yeah. As you said, there's no officially supported
Spotify
pre-save. So any pre-save services an artist is using that's a developer using the
Spotify
api to kind of hack it together. I've seen some of them work really well.
Share
29:17
I've seen some not work well, but it's not gonna impact playlisting because, you know, that's all done by a third-party developer, uh we won't see a number of free saves if you're pre safe campaign leads to a really big release day. You know, maybe that will help you kind of stand out on platform. But uh you know, all those pre-saves services are happening off
Spotify
and just plugging into our API.
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Ari Herstand
29:41
But it turns into saves. And when you said you look at the save rate, so if like if I get 10,000 people unlikely but 10,000 people to pre-save my single and you see week one, it's like "Holy Shit this song has 10,000 saves in just a few days". That does something, right?
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Sam Duboff
29:59
Yeah, it does something I've seen tracks where the day one saves will be way beyond day one streams. And so we see that that, you know, if if the the saves aren't leading to streaming, that's, you know, only going to do so much for you.
Share
30:14
The reason you want three saves because it's going to get your biggest fans into uh into your new release as soon as it comes out. And if they're following you on
Spotify
, it'll go in the Release Radar. You know, artists are doing a great job on social getting their big fans into new releases.
Share
30:28
And pre-saves can be can be really useful if you're not just getting, you know, casual listeners to go through a pre safe flow because they're surprised at the end, but because you're getting people most excited for your music to pre-save it. So they go back and listen to it.
Share
30:43
We are we just started testing.
Share
30:45
The pre-release page, you may have seen it on platform
Florence + The Machine
was the first artist to use it. And, it's an early, early test. And so we definitely have nothing to announce. But we know there's that kind of pre-release hype need for artists is bigger than ever and it's something we're exploring. We had, you know, for instance, page had a few videos where she had to share what was becoming on the album.
Share
31:12
You could, pre-save it and then there's a push notification, a little banner on home when the album came out. So we'll see if listeners are responding to it, we'll see the feedback we get from artists, like all of our tests. But I was really excited to see it because yeah, I agree with you. pre-save and pre-release is a really cool opportunity.
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Ari Herstand
31:31
Cool. That's super helpful and I hope it does release and I hope it's a free tool for artists. Do you think it will be free or you think it's going to be a paid promotional tool?
Share
Sam Duboff
31:40
Yeah, I honestly couldn't say we're one test in. But yeah, that would be a good opportunity tool. Absolutely.
Share
Ari Herstand
31:50
Okay. You mentioned followers also, how important our followers and what is the purpose of artists gaining followers.
Share
Sam Duboff
32:02
Followers are a way for listeners to say, you know, "I want to know everything this artist is up to on
Spotify"
.
Share
32:09
They follow you from your artist profile, there's a few other places they can follow you. And it does a few things first. It means every new release will 100% certainty hit the Release Radar when it updates, uh you know, if you follow any artist, every new release, you know, it'll be in the Release Radar, Release Radar is super popular with music fans.
Share
32:31
We also have a feed called what's new, that it's like the bell icon, you can see at the top of your
Spotify
. And that is just, you know, timeline that shows you every artist you follow, every release that came out from them.
Share
32:46
We're also testing, you know, could we bring merch into that could bring tickets and that what's new feed, you know, how could that be a place where you be able to find out everything going going on for all the artists you follow.
Share
32:57
And also follows a big signal to all of our personalization tech. So if you know those emails that listeners get recommending concerts near them when we, you know, our system looks at what song should be placed in algorithmic playlists. Like Discover Weekly if listeners following you. It's a really big signal to our system that they love your music, they want to hear more of it.
Share
33:21
And so yeah, driving followers is great for an artist. And you can - you know, always follow, see how many followers you're getting and
Spotify
for Artists and tracking that way.
Share
Ari Herstand
33:32
So, you know, I know about the
Spotify
emails that say, this artist is coming to town and that's great. But is there a way that artists have any control over what messaging is sent to their fans and more? So, how do I get in touch with the people that said, I want to follow you?
Share
33:54
And how do I send them a message? Like, on
Band Camp
, for instance, anyone who's ever purchased anything from me on
Band Camp
, not only do I get their emails, but I can send a message. It's like a full, it's really easy and quick. I just like typing a message and boom, it sends it to everyone who's ever bought something for me.
Share
34:10
Can I get that feature for followers? Can I just, like, you know, I got 100,000 followers on
Spotify
, Can I just like, send a message and be like, "Hey guys, comment going on tour, check out tickets right here". Like when can I do that?
Share
Sam Duboff
34:22
That'd be awesome. Yeah, we uh very much like, you know, someone's following you on
Spotify
. It's it's for the music and, hopefully they're following you on lots of other social platforms where you can uh kind of keep them updated on everything you're doing.
Share
34:38
You know, if they're following you, they're gonna always get your new releases, It's gonna be in the Release Radar, It'll be in the, what's new feed, it'll be, you know, higher in recommendations.
Share
34:47
And hopefully they're visiting your artist profile to where you can make an artist playlist that curates everything, get your merch there, get your tickets, got, you know, a tipping link, you can do an artist chick at the top spotlighting the main thing you want them to to check out.
Share
35:00
I'm really excited about the live audio rooms test we talked about at the beginning. For that reason, it's like, you know, one of the first times artists are able to you know, talk live to the biggest music fans through
Spotify
and that's cool.
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Ari Herstand
35:13
And I saw the case study with
Elohim
and that looked, that looked nice and like she said, you know, you know, 100 some super fans were in that room with her and she got to talk up the release when it came out and that that's great.
Share
35:25
But with someone like her who's got, I don't know, 1 to 2 million monthly listeners and you got 100 people and it's like sweet, you engage your super fans, which is awesome, but how do you engage all the other people like the 100,000 people that clicked? I want to follow this artist?
Share
35:39
And you know, and there's that's where the disconnect is. Like, we don't have a way to get to to communicate with our listeners or even our active listeners, even the people that click the button. I want to follow this artist. Like how do you, you know, how do we get more in touch with them?
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Sam Duboff
35:54
Yeah, I know that you know, turning a listener into a fan is definitely, you know, if not the biggest challenge for an artist now, it's up there.
Share
36:03
And it's always for us, we're trying to offer as many tools as possible to give artists cool ways to connect with new listeners, you know, new fans, their biggest fans.
Share
36:13
And then, you know, we're trying to balance that with it. If you're a listener, how do we make sure we're protecting that list, their experience where you're not, you know, getting emails from old artists, you love all the time, and that balance is what we're always working on.
Share
36:26
We're definitely developing some cool ways that lead artists, you know, bring their whole self to the platform. So, you know, stuff like Canvas, new artist profile tools, these live experiences. So we're definitely planning to do more in that space because I hear you, it's a place we want to do a lot more.
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Ari Herstand
36:44
I want to get back to getting added to editorial. Other than submitting through the
Spotify
for Artists or in addition to that, what else should artists be doing to help their chances that get added to the playlist, and like you're talking to that, you know, Selena yesterday had a playlist, What did she say? She likes to see in a pitch? What else should artists be doing outside of just that pitching tool?
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Sam Duboff
37:07
Yeah. You know, I don't think there's any silver bullet, sadly, definitely following all those best practices around pitching early. The metadata is all really key, as, you know, you've done a lot of really great content materials about the importance of that metadata being in there, in the pitch itself.
Share
37:27
The uh, really focusing on on the story of the song, and some of that kind of extra context that won't come through and in the recording itself. Promotional plan is always nice. That's cool to see.
Share
37:41
Not always, it's important. We definitely get a lot of that, you know, tour dates and publicity nice that less. So I, you know, certainly artists get included.
Share
37:52
It's a good sign of momentum you're getting, for our editors, especially, uh, you know, so many predators around the world are so immersed and music, culture, they're seeing press, they're following everything on social, they want to know the story of the song. And one of those elements that can only come through through, you know, you explaining it, as an artist.
Share
38:15
So I'd say, you know, up front there, It's all about uh you know, that pitching process, we give the same process, the biggest artists of the world and the you know, a new artist just starting out or using the same tool that goes into our system the same way. And our editors really are going through all that music as crazy as that sounds.
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Ari Herstand
38:34
I gotta pause right there for a second. Hold on, you're saying that it's the same tool that major label artists use, or major labels are using as DIY self released independent artists, they have the same Spotify pitching tool in Spotify for Artists?
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Sam Duboff
38:48
Exactly the same. And so in
Spotify
, for artists, you can add members to your team. So if you have a manager, a label rep they all go in the same kind of artist team. So it's, you know, 11 artist on
Spotify
for Artists, anyone on your team with the right permission level can pitch for you.
Share
39:05
So, you know, if you're a signed artist, you might ask your label to pitch for you. If you're even for signed artists, sometimes artists will pitch themselves, managers sometimes will pitch anyone with the right permissions.
Spotify
for Artists pitches goes the exact same place, exact same tool. No matter how big or small, and artists you are.
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Ari Herstand
39:22
Do editors prioritize pitches that come from labels versus artists themselves?
Share
Sam Duboff
39:28
No, definitely not. You know, you can see which user submitted it to put context, even just like if someone's using first person or third person, we needed to to make sense. But yeah, sometimes it's really cool, you'll see from the biggest artists in the world will be pitching themselves.
Share
39:45
There's definitely no downside to having a manager or a label rep do it? Artists have plenty going on. They don't need to be uh you know, go going into petra playlist if they don't want to really up to the artist, but uh it's the exact same tool, whether you're a label manager, artist, you're using the exact same tool and same process and on our side for our editor tools. It looks exactly the same. And so yeah, the biggest artist in the world and DIY artist just starting out all pitching through Spotify for Artists in the same way.
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Ari Herstand
40:17
Step me through the back end. And the editors process when they get these pitches coming through, how are they filtered and segmented to the appropriate editors. And how are they reviewing them?
Share
40:27
I'm assuming and correct me if I'm wrong that any song that comes from a major label as the top of priority and only if they have time they're going to get to the Indies because it seems like there's guaranteed placement for every major label song at least from my vantage point.
Share
40:42
And it's a real shot in the dark of an indie artist is going to get it. So step me through how this segmentation filtering process works. Who, which editors are getting, which songs, how does that work? And yeah.
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Sam Duboff
40:53
Yeah. I don't know the really nitty-gritty details of how that, how that it does work, but there's definitely filters about like audience size. And so you know, the bigger an audience and an artist has uh that's, you know, one signal they may look at uh genre, they'll look at you know, if an artist has been playlisted a certain genre before, an editor in that genre will be kind of keyed into them.
Share
41:20
And our team, you know, offers a bunch of data and the editor tools and so they'll be looking at all those kind of stats we talked about, you know, save raid and slippery and how a song is, is tracking.
Share
41:33
But no, there's no kind of toggle or filter based on what label they're on. But yeah, for sure, you know, an artist with a bigger audience size, that's gonna be one of the kind of signals editors will be using the sift through all the music that they listen to.
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Ari Herstand
41:48
Well, I'm confused because I see major label artists all the time come out with their very first single and it gets a boatload of playlist before the traction anywhere else. It's not like they got a
Tiktok
viral hit. It's just like, boom day one bunch of playlist inclusion.
Share
42:02
And then I see indie artists that, you know, like me or others that have great history traction. Lots of saves lots of followers. All the things that you just mentioned... don't get played this inclusion. So like really give me the real thing here. Like you're do, I guess I'm gonna ask the question again, do major label artists get guaranteed inclusion, period?
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Sam Duboff
42:22
No. Yeah, I wish I had even more details on the day to day editor process for you. But, definitely not. I hear you. You know, we look at, I know people are watching the biggest playlist, eagle-eyed for sure. And, You know, we're looking at the entire playlist ecosystem and 150,000 artist playlist did the first time over the last two years.
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Ari Herstand
42:46
And how many of those artists weren't labels?
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Sam Duboff
42:50
Yeah, I don't, I don't know. But certainly at that magnitude of 150,000 artists, we're likely talking majority independently distributed.
Share
43:00
aAnd yeah, it's, there's a whole wide set of playlists and, so many of, you know, more, and a lot of the top playlists that are really growing fast are fresh finds ecosystem that really focuses, I think, you know, there's like 20, even 30 fresh finds playlists now broken down by genres and by markets and those playlists are really popular and just focused on the independent sector and kind of helping discover independent acts. And so we look at that ecosystem as a whole.
Share
43:33
We're investing a ton in programs like fresh funds. We have a artist development program within the fresh finds playlists as well, where we take a handful of artists each quarter and kind of guide them through the
Spotify
ecosystem, give them some marketing support.
Share
43:48
We set them up with producers through our kind of notable uh sub-brand for songwriters and producers. They had to release a
Spotify
single at the end of the program.
Share
43:57
So there's a wide range of playlist get involved in that program in the fresh finds program starts with the fresh funds editors. So I know that's a frustrating, but yeah, no pitching process for that. Fresh finds editors are awesome.
Share
44:11
They're really just looking at kind of new music from independent artists. They're finding ones, they think I have a ton of potential super earlier in their career. And uh yeah, the program's been great. It's I think we're three or four quarters into it.
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Ari Herstand
44:26
How many songs get uploaded to
Spotify
every day real quick because I've been getting a lot of questions about this. I want to let you know that even though Artistic Academy enrollment is not currently open, We only open it a couple times a year and that is to focus on the current students that we do have.
Share
44:43
And we just go in these open enrollment periods a couple times a year. You can always apply if you're really, really interested in one of our courses and you think you'd be a great fit and you just can't wait until the next open enrollment period. That's okay. We open a limited number of slots throughout the year. Application only, head on over to always take Academy dot com.
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45:04
Check out the course that we have available. One of them when I want to let you know about is our newest one.
Tiktok
for musicians, it's taught by Austin Georges and June Park of Flight House. Now, Flight House is the number one brand on
Tiktok
. They have nearly 30 million
Tiktok
followers, but more so.
Share
45:21
And why we enlisted them to teach this course is because this is the company that the major labels higher to get their songs to go viral. They've worked with artists like Doja Cat and Cardi B and Lil Nas Ax. And now students of RS Take Academy if you want to learn from the premier people in Music For
Tiktok
, join us in Artistic Academy.
Tiktok
for musicians, you can use the code nmb for 10% off.
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45:45
Also check out our special events course taught by Carrie Raeburn this course, we specifically focus on the
Performing Arts
center market. Did you know that many people are making six figures touring
Performing Arts
centers and other private event venues around the country, it's kind of the hidden secret of the music industry.
Share
46:04
So Kerry teaches you all about that. This is not about touring clubs, is not about sleeping on couches. This can be a very lucrative career path for you. If you're the right artist for special events and specifically in the
Performing Arts
center market, feel free to head over to Artistic Academy dot com and apply.
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46:24
This episode is brought to you by bands a
Google
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Google
for years, long before they were paying me to tell you about it. I told everyone about it because it's super, super easy. Don't mess around with web developers. Let me tell you the most frustrating people on planet Earth are web developers.
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46:47
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47:09
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47:27
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47:46
This is all at Bans Google.com, you can get a 30 day free trial. If you use the code Ari, that's my name. And you also get 15% off the first year of any subscription. Go to Google.com. Use the promo code Ari. That's just spelled a. R. I. For 15% off the first year of any subscription.
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Sam Duboff
48:12
Great question. I don't know off the top of my head, but tens of thousands.
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Ari Herstand
48:16
Okay. I know the last number like a year and a half ago was 60,000. And then I was at
South
by just a few months ago, this past March in 2022 I heard will page said it was uh 80,000. I don't know if that he was just throwing that number out.
Share
48:30
I was trying to get some kind of clarity on this, but you don't know Well, well, page usually knows what he's talking about, I Figured. But okay, so alright, well, let's just say it's somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 songs a day.
Share
48:43
There's there's no humanly possible way that an editor can review every song, I guess. Maybe do you know this? What's the percentage of songs that get released that get actually pitched to editors?
Share
Sam Duboff
48:57
Yeah, I'm not sure. Certainly not tens of thousands a day. It's a yeah, that number is all sorts of tracks. It's definitely a much, much smaller set that, are getting pitched
Spotify
for Artists. Yeah.
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Ari Herstand
49:10
Okay.
Share
49:11
Cool. So let's talk personalize the algorithmic playlist that you mentioned before.
Share
49:17
How can an artist increase their chances of getting added to these personalized playlists? Like Discover Weekly. We talk about Release Radar. Just get followers. That's 100% chance. You know, if you submit to
Spotify
for Artists to the editors and back in at least seven days in advance, you're going to get added to Release Radar.
Share
49:34
That's great. But let's talk to the other ones, the daily mixes, the, you know, made for use uh the the
Discovery
is all of that kind of stuff. All the algorithmic playlists. How do songs get added and how do they stay on?
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Sam Duboff
49:48
Yeah. We have a new site I'll promote quickly. We launched a few months ago called made to be found. Just uh Google. And these types of questions are uh definitely top five we get around how do I tap into these personalized sessions? And so we try to break it down.
Share
50:08
We kind of go through all the different kind of sources of
Discovery
and
Spotify
and list, you know, 20 of the many signals that are going into personalization. But yeah, diving into that kind of algorithmic sets. There's three different categories.
Share
50:23
You've got personalized Editorial playlists, you have algorithmic playlists, and then you have radio and auto play. And each one is a bit different. Again, together, those are the ones that drive about a third of new artists discoveries for personalized Editorial.
Share
50:39
That's things like, you know, beast Mode and songs to sing in the shower and happy hits where based on what genres you like as a listener, you might listen to a different song in the shower and then I might for for all those uh playlists, a kind of really large pool is curated by an editor that's through the playlist pitching process still.
Share
51:02
And then from that really wide set, they'll our system will kind of personalize the order based on the types of music you like as a listener.
Share
51:11
And so, you know, that's one of the reasons it's great to provide as much detail as you can and the pitch to our editors because for a lot of those personalized Editorial playlists you know, there really about moods and moments and genres and you can give that extra detail to help that other place it there.
Share
51:30
If you get on a personalized Editorial playlist, you can get a we call it a unique link in
Spotify
for Artists. Where if you share that link on social, it'll pin your song to the top of that playlist for anyone who clicks it.
Share
51:45
Because sometimes you'll you'll get on happy hits, you'll want to share it, but it's gonna look different for every listener.
Share
51:51
If you use that unique link, you kind of get in there at the top algorithmic playlist, you know, that stuff like you mentioned, a bunch of them Discover Weekly
Spotify
mixes blend is a new one.
Share
52:03
We recently launched uh can be different for for all the metadata is really critical across all of it.
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Ari Herstand
52:10
When you say metadata, that is explain what you mean by metadata.
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Sam Duboff
52:16
You know, the collaborators, you can identify three genres. That kind of can help you signal for uh what types of listeners might like it. You know, you can add lyrics through your distributor,
Musixmatch
. You can you know, make sure you're adding your song credits, all that information, uh you know, the duration of the song.
Share
52:40
All that information kind of adds additional signals to to kind of help us to help our system no where to place it all that can make a big difference then Yeah, for uh different playlists, there's different ways to really optimize your chances. Their Release Radars, one we've already talked about.
Share
52:59
If you can get, you know, encourage your fans to follow you, you'll make sure you get into that Release Radar across the board for uh, you know, all these algorithmic playlists, our systems, looking at all the same sorts of signals that you'd be looking for as an artist for momentum, right? Like if the song is really connecting with listeners, if that's safe rates five being added to playlists.
Share
53:22
If the streams for listeners are high, right? If someone puts you on repeat rather than just listening ones and moving on. So, you know, all the things you're trying to do as an artist anyway, get fans into your work and excited about it. That all feeds back into the system so our algorithms can make even better recommendations to listeners.
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Ari Herstand
53:40
Cool. And you mentioned a few things that, now, how do you stay on this? Because I've heard of artists that say that they had a song in radio for awhile and then it got bumped. It's like I was on
Twitter
, I was when I asked like I'm gonna interview
Spotify
, what's the question? She's like, man, she's a piano, instrumental artist.
Share
54:00
She's like, I was getting 20,000 streams a day from radio and for for for years, you know, and she's like, and then it just dropped the last few months down to about 3000 streams a day in radio. She's like, I didn't I don't know what happened, like, can you explain that or what's going on there? How do songs get removed or bumped from these algorithmic playlists?
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Sam Duboff
54:22
Yeah, super interesting. It shouldn't be happening. Uh It's much more of a sliding scale than that. So if you're looking like a personalized Editorial playlist, if a song really wasn't connecting with listeners on it, maybe, you know, removed over time by an editor, but for any other algorithmic set, it's really gonna be a sliding scale. It's not that you're on it or you're not on it.
Share
54:44
Uh you know, based on higher songs performing and the kind of data signals that our algorithms are getting back. Uh It might kind of go up, go down, I know that can be kind of frustrating if you can't figure out the reason, but yeah, definitely shouldn't be going from, you know, a ton of streams to very few. It doesn't kind of leave radio, anything like that.
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Ari Herstand
55:06
Cool. Uh Yeah, I don't know what to tell her, but she's showing me the data, I was like, man, I'll ask them, but I don't know. All right, so you mentioned getting added, yeah, getting added to uh playlists, like user playlists, like listeners adding your song to their own playlist is away is like signal that gets sent and Right, that's something important.
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Sam Duboff
55:27
Yeah, definitely. And that's obviously a huge part of the
Spotify
ecosystem, tons of music playlist. Some people just have a private playlist that they used to sort their music and then there's some really popular public playlists. I'm sure, you know, a bunch where have you?
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Ari Herstand
55:44
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, no, I have my low volume funk playlist, I think we're at like 55 or 60,000 followers on that. And it's like the number one driver of my funk band, brass roots district. It's like the number, we're, I mean, we're on thousands of playlists, user playlists.
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Sam Duboff
55:59
You have that you have an artist.
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56:02
Yeah, yeah.
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Ari Herstand
56:04
Oh yeah, it's public, it's right there, it's an artist profile. And you know, I like, I'm a big fan too, so I would just add songs. And I would share it in like, like, you know, probably like funk
Facebook
groups that I was in, and people would be like, oh, that's great, thanks so much. You know, I got a bunch of followers that way.
Share
56:18
And so, but but this brings me to the next point about the whole ecosystem of user generated playlists. And there is a whole business model here, because you just said it yourself that when people add you to their user playlists that sends signals to
Spotify
that uh will react to the algorithm playlist, which eventually theoretically will react to the editors, which is, you know, get you on the thing.
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56:44
So artists are listening and their their mindset is, oh, I need to get added to more user generated playlists, especially if they're active. Like, you know, my mind Levine funk with 60,000 followers, not just followers. And there's listeners, like I'm getting thousands and thousands of listeners every month, my funk band because this playlist is active.
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57:05
So it's to peoples benefit, I get D and all the time. Hey, I got this new song, we add me to low volume funk, and I'll listen, if I dig it, I'll add it, why not? You know, help them out. And but now we go one layer deeper and I know that's against the terms and I report it when it happens, but like people who run one run popular playlists know this and they know that artists are trying to find any way in.
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57:29
And so, you know, some play listers when they get sent to DM Hey, will you add my song to your playlists? I'd be like, yeah, 25 bucks, and I'll add you, that's against the terms, correct?
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57:42
Okay, so that happens, and I, you know, I try to tell people like don't do that, and if it does, you know?
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57:47
And when I get emails from people saying, hey here, you can pay me 100 50 bucks or whatever and I'll add you afford that to
Spotify
support so they can take those places because I know that's against totally and everyone should report those, but but now we get into this gray area of the third party services, like a playlist push, like submit hub where they're not technically charging you for playlist inclusion, they're charging you for consideration.
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58:16
And that is, I think where there's gray hairs, like we're not breaking
Spotify
terms, because like we're not guaranteeing you in the inclusion is just consideration.
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58:24
So like, you know, but they're charging playlist pushes charging thousands of dollars of campaign for you to listen to it, submit hub, you know, the actual play listers, we'll get a few bucks per lesson on that. What do you think about these kinds of 3rd party services?
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Sam Duboff
58:42
I don't know enough about, about either of those, comment on them in general. You know, any service that's helping artists grow their audience authentically we support. That's great. Yeah, that that gray areas where things can be tough and uh you know, it gets into real questions of, you know, are the playlists are being added to really popular listeners and driving real streams.
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59:12
You know, anytime uh an editor's uh you know, a user is charging money to be added to a playlist that's against our terms of service is that's gonna come back to bite you because that will be taken down over time. The streams will be kind of removed from your stream count and so on, and so you're always going to want to avoid that.
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59:31
But uh you know, if it's a real user playlist with a real following that's gonna show in the data, a lot of user curator czar are great, and you know, if it's a service that's authentic, that helps you develop your music and get you out there That's awesome. It's definitely is a tough ecosystem out there.
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59:52
You know, we see all the services that are advertising on
Instagram
or dropping into artist DmS and they'll present themselves as, you know, an authentic marketing service, but actually, you know, it might be a service using artificial streaming where it's not driving actually user intent, what you make it out of.
Share
01:00:17
So, artificial streaming, you know, any stream that doesn't reflect genuine user listening intent, and that also means any instance of attempting to manipulate
Spotify
with automated processes. So, you know, bob's scripts attempt to manipulate
Spotify
charts.
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01:00:36
And we have a huge team at
Spotify
with investing a ton and technology to help identify and take down our official streaming.
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01:00:47
And, you know, if artist engages in an artificial streaming, there's a sliding scale of of actions that can take place, you know, from correcting the streaming and chart numbers, withholding
royalties
, sometimes even having to remove the manipulated track. And what's really tough is sometimes an artist might, I realize that's what the service is engaging in.
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01:01:09
And I think that's a really small minority of the cases. Often they think they're, you know, buying a legit service and it so turns out that, what the service is doing on the back end is engaging in artificial streaming. And that's an issue that it really breaks my heart.
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01:01:27
And, article streaming in general is such an important issue to tavern industry because it doesn't just affect that one artist or that one song, if an artist gets away with artificial streaming, that takes money from the royalty pool, that should go to one artist for real listening and shifts it to someone who didn't earn it.
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01:01:47
And it's really tough. So when, you know, we can kind of talk through some of the things artists can do before buying a service to try to kind of research it. There's some things you can do, Yeah. You know, uh, there's a few things you can do kind of before you buy a service to try to kind of get it. And then there's a few things you can do right after, uh, you kind of, by a service before.
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01:02:08
And I wish it was an even cleaner answer. Uh, really do your research
Google
a bunch. And reddit and forums and artist forums are particularly good. There a lot of services might change their name once we started and other streaming services have started take down. Uh, you know, their tracks, they'll, they'll change your name.
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01:02:29
A lot of artists do a great job of kind of sharing those stories after the fact. So go deep on
Google
, really try to make sure this is a legit service. If you can talk to other artists who have used it before, and I can't speak to what the services that you're buying after you buy it,
Spotify
for Artists can kind of help you, quickly make sure that there's nothing fishy going on.
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01:02:53
So if you look at the, you know, track that's getting promoted in the source of streams, data, you see a big number of streams coming in the other category that you can't really explain. You know, usually the majority of your streams will be in, you know, profile and catalog or listing its own playlist. There's another category. If that's looking high, that might kind of raise the question for you.
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01:03:18
You know, I bet it's like, you know, streams through like our api services, it's kind of any sort of uh kind of a catch all for, it's usually a really small percentage of your total streams, that's kind of like, you know, if a developer builds, you know, a cool service or you can play
Spotify
songs through some website that might show up another, that sort of thing.
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01:03:41
So yeah, you know, that usually should be small suddenly or seeing a huge spike in other something's up. If you expect, you know, you see a huge spike of streams you're not expecting, like you might expect a playlist at, or a new release, spiking streams if it's kind of all happening in a random Wednesday and then it goes back down the next day.
Share
01:03:60
Or really, if there's a big spike in any one category would be assigned to look for, and definitely look at your streaming cities too often, if it's artificial streaming, you know, might be specific cities that don't really make sense to you are suddenly your top city for the song.
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01:04:15
If you're noticing anything suspicious and
Spotify
for Artists reach out to your distributor right away where our teams in touch with, uh, distributors kind of all the time around artificial streaming enforcement and, especially if you're an artist and, uh, you know, you thought you were kind of buying an authentic development service, and you're noticing saying your
Spotify
for Artists, you know, right away, let your distributor now, and they're in touch with artificial streaming team.
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01:04:43
And, you know, I'm sure there's sometimes, uh, where it can be, you know, tough to get the right contact. And I've heard lots of horror stories from artists where they didn't, intended an orange distinguished flags, artificial streaming and you know, it wasn't. And uh, you know, those sorts of issues. We definitely never want to see.
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Ari Herstand
01:05:06
Yeah, you say get in touch with your distributor. Now I have talked to friends and people who've realized this after the fact they thought they were hiring a playlist plugger, essentially somebody with contact, you know, essentially a publicist for playlist is like a big thing out there and then it turns out they look like bots streams.
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01:05:30
So they got in touch with the distributor and distributors like, "Oh, you're dead to us". They essentially booted the artist from the distribution and then took down the album and then blocked all their streams. So like get in touch with the district.
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01:05:44
Oh, it happens all the time. So like I have to push back and get in touch with the distributor because if you do get in touch with the distributor, your distributor - distributors don't, I'm sorry, they don't care really. Most of them about the artist, they care about the relationship with
Spotify
.
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01:05:58
They are, all the distributors are terrified that they're going to get downgraded from
Spotify
saying, oh, you allow fraudulent streaming activity on your songs And so we're gonna punish you. So in return, all the distributors punish the artist and the artists like, I don't know what else I'm supposed to do to promote my music.
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01:06:16
You told me that I should be prioritizing
Spotify
. So I hired, spent a lot of money on somebody that said that they were going to be pitching me to legitimate playlist. Nobody activity at all. And now the artist is fucked.
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Sam Duboff
01:06:30
Man. Yeah, I hate hearing stuff like that.
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01:06:32
Artificial streaming, it's such a tough issue because on the, on the flip side, you know, I think years ago artificial streaming was such a kind of like prevalent issue on streaming services.
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01:06:45
And that's why we, and I know a lot of other streaming services have invested so much in it because, there is a lot of that activity that has been going on and I think it's really been ramped down a ton and again, that's all, you know, artificial streams that are left on the platform that takes money from the royalty pool away from artists who deserve it to, to music that doesn't, and any system like that when we're talking about the scale of any of these streaming services, it's really tough.
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01:07:12
So that shouldn't be what distributors are communicating back to artists. And, that's tough to hear. I hate hearing that story.
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Ari Herstand
01:07:19
I wish it was different.
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Sam Duboff
01:07:20
Really tough issue.
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Ari Herstand
01:07:21
It's not just one distributed like I've, I've documented this from virtually every distributor out there and that's, and I've talked to distributors directly to.
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01:07:28
I'm just like I even wrote an article, you can Google you search and it's an artistic, I said, dear indie distributors stop punishing your artists, it's not their fault because it was happening so frequently an artist would come to me and they're like, my album just got removed.
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01:07:41
All my
royalties
are being blocked. I spent $5000 on a release campaign on marketing, and now everything is removed from me and I can't get it back, and what should I do? I was just like, I don't know what to tell you. You know? It's...
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Sam Duboff
01:07:56
Yeah. It's a tough problem I hear you.
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Ari Herstand
01:07:58
Yeah, so, All right, you mentioned the royalty pool a few times. Can you just break down quickly how
royalties
work on
Spotify
? And what do you mean by the royalty pool?
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Sam Duboff
01:08:14
Yeah, for sure. So
Spotify
uh gets money in two ways for music from listeners, subscription fees for for
Spotify
Premium, and then advertising revenue that is for audio ads on our free tier listeners on
Spotify
can free and then you can upgrade to the premium. The majority of our revenue comes from premium subscription fees.
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01:08:39
All that money, we kind of pull up
Spotify
like all the streaming services keeps about a third of that money that comes in and two-thirds is going back to rights holders on the recording and the publishing side.
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01:08:55
And it is - last year we paid out about seven billion, a little over $7 billion dollars in relative to the right soldiers. That was the most of any retailer in one year in history. So a ton of money going out.
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01:09:12
It is split up between recording and publishing as you know, and it's allocated based on stream share. So there's no fixed per stream rate on our service or any other. I know you talk about that a lot.
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01:09:27
It is based on what we call stream share, so if - I'll kind of oversimplify a bit here because it gets complicated - but in general, you know, each month, if there's, you know, a million, the 100 streams on
Spotify
and you got one of them, you know, for every 100 you got one stream, you're going to get 1% off of that kind of total royalty pool.
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01:09:53
And so, you know, each month we're allocating total streams. You know, we'll separate the premium pool from the free pool and allocate out based on stream share. And every major streaming service works that way. It's based on stream share. So...
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Ari Herstand
01:10:07
Well, let me let me break that down a little bit, a few questions about that, because... do artists, okay, doesn't matter - does artists stream share rate change based on the distributor or label that they go through? Is it different?
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Sam Duboff
01:10:30
Stream share? No, no, no.
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Ari Herstand
01:10:31
So let me, let me say. One Ari Herstand stream, who distributed through
Distrokid
, is that going to be the same amount as one
Harry Styles
stream that was distributed through Universal or something?
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Sam Duboff
01:10:48
You know, the same stream share?
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Ari Herstand
01:10:50
Identical. It's the same person. It's it's you listening on your premium
Spotify
account from new york. You listen to
Harry Styles
first and then you listen to me, I happen to go through
Distrokid
and
Harry Styles
happen to go through a major label. Are we going to get the exact same payment from Sam's stream?
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Sam Duboff
01:11:08
Great question. I wish I knew licensing at the level required to answer that largely yeah, stream share, stream share. And so royalty pool will be kind of allocated based on the percentage of the total streams you have in that period with whatever.
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Ari Herstand
01:11:22
I thought major label artists got paid more because they were able to negotiate higher rates than the indie distributors could with
Spotify
per stream.
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Sam Duboff
01:11:32
I'm sure I only understand about 1% of all the stuff that goes into licensing on platform, definitely a big focus for us and I know you've kind of covered are Loud and Clear kind of transparency report we do around
royalties.
Every year, we just did it for the second year and we're really focused on, you know, can we create as much financial opportunity as possible for artists? No matter.
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Ari Herstand
01:12:03
Here's a here's a different question because like Loud and Clear is great. And and you said paid $7 billion like you know,
Spotify
pays out a lot, you keep only a third of the money, which I think a lot of people understand, you and
Apple
are virtually keeping the same amount of the commission. So you get, you know,
Spotify
does get a bad rap.
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01:12:22
Why don't you then move to a user-centric payment model, which means you spend $10 the month on your subscription this month and you only listen to me uh this month, let's just say, you only listen to me. So I get all 10 of those dollars less
Spotify
commission of third.
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01:12:40
So I would get, you know about seven bucks, you know, or so just under that uh $7 bucks if you listen to me, you know, 1000 streams which would equal, you know, a few, you know, cents there because then also if you move to user-centric payment, not only would artists in my mind especially, but the super fans get paid more bots wouldn't be a thing anymore.
Share
01:13:05
Period, there would be no more bots existing because it would just not be financially viable for anyone to run a boat service because whoever they're listening to like that's what the money that they're getting.
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01:13:16
So why not just change the payment model from this royalty pool that you talk about that is so opaque and some are distributors get paid more than others and labels are getting paid, then you can't break it down, there's no per stream rate. It's all based on this money here... Why not just say like all the artists that you listen to this month are gonna get part of your subscription fee or ad revenue fee?
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Sam Duboff
01:13:37
Yeah, user user-centric models really interesting. We've, we've tried to do our part in contributing to the conversation and, you know, for a streaming service, ours or any other, you're kind of playing out the same amount to rights holders either way, you know, the $7 billion dollars for us per year.
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01:13:55
And so, you know, in some ways the streaming services is neutral on it. It's about rights holders agreeing that's the way they want money to be allocated.
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01:14:01
And so, you know, we've said publicly, for a while now, you know, we're willing to switch to a user-centric model, if that's what artists and songwriters and rights holders want to do, and we can't really make that decision on our own because of all the complexity across all the rights holders that have to kind of agree to it.
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01:14:20
And so, you know, it requires that broad industry alignment, to make that change that said, you know, the research we've seen from, from third parties to date, suggests a shift to user-centric payments, you know, might not benefit artists as much as, you know, and I think a lot of people were originally hoping ourselves and a few other services contributed a bunch of data, a French study you might have seen with a National Music Center and they found kind of uh for artists outside the top 10,000 user-centric model that actually only change payouts by, you know, a few euros per year.
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01:15:00