You can easily find plenty of botted playlists within Spotify. The following checks can help to uncover them and eventually help to gain a better understanding of how to find naturally growing playlists.
First of all, we need to understand how people actually find, listen, follow and engage to Spotify playlists. Obviously, every person has his individual behavior of using Spotify, however, if we are speaking of masses, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is how most playlists can be found naturally.
It means that if people entering a keyword into the search result bar into Spotify, Spotify may show a Playlist as the main search result. Furthermore, you can select the playlist filter, so you will receive only playlists as search results. Not every keyword receives the same amount of search hits, but you can imagine that the playlists that will show up on the first positions, will gain the most attention of the crowd.
How SEO works on Spotify
In short: If a playlist is ranked on top result positions within Spotify, it is likely that many people find & found the playlist organically. For sure it is possible to advertise playlists as well, however, advertising might be very expensive if you want to promote your playlist in countries like the USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden...
That's why many playlist curators use rather cheap countries like India, Pakistan or Iran to advertise their playlist. We definitely don't want to degrade advertised playlists, tho it is very likely that once the ads will stop, the playlist won't continue receiving traffic. In case the advertising helped to rank the playlist on a good search result position of a well-engaged keyword, it is likely that the playlist will receive traffic continuously.
How to review Spotify playlists properly in 5 Steps:
1. Check the Playlist's search result position. The search result positions may differ from country to country and from previous engagements with a playlist, so we recommend using a new and clean account for your reviews. 2. Use data analytic tools like Chartmetric, which allow you to track the daily follower growth of Spotify playlists. Most keywords on Spotify receive traffic steadily and evenly, which kind of makes sense. If you see that a playlist gains followers evenly, that is a sign of organic growth.
Sometimes there may occur any wrong data displays on such analytic tools, so keep in mind that such analytic tools shall only help to gain an understanding of how the playlists are engaged.
3. Check out the about section of artists who are featured within a playlist. Preferably try to find smaller artists and see if the playlist shows up in their "Discovered On" section. If the playlist shows up among the 5 playlists, that means that the playlist is one of the top 5 playlists which feature the artist.
Unfortunately, we've seen even botted playlists that make it to this section, so always take all the provided steps into your review. Besides, under the Discovered On section, you will find the "Where people listen" section, listing all the top 5 cities, where the artist is being listened to.
You can imagine that if there is a significant decrease of listeners among the cities, that may be a sign that there is a botted playlist featuring the artist. However, do not jump to conclusions immediately as artists might have a narrow local fanbase. As organically growing playlists can and will be found globally, they shouldn't receive traffic from a single city...
4. If possible, try to find out when the playlist has been created. That is not always possible as some playlist curators update their songs regularly. However, some curators don't remove certain songs which may be an indicator of when the playlist has been created.
It is definitely an organic sign if the playlist has been created years ago. In almost all cases it takes months and years to grow a playlist to thousands of followers. There are obviously always different trending keywords that may result in fast follower growth. Playlists can also grow significantly if they climb in the "SEO-ladder." So we recommend taking all the mentioned steps into consideration and definitely keep an eye on the playlist on a daily basis. 5. Make use of your mind. We can imagine that not every artist has the time, knowledge, and energy to review playlists very detailed. However, if you want to be sure that the playlists featuring you are real, sadly you need to do these checks. From our experience, the majority of botted playlists use very generic names like "rap", top hits, or whatever.
Understanding Spotify SEO Playlists
If you spend time checking keywords, you will notice that there are tons of officially curated Spotify playlists dominating the SEO positions. Most of the time it is very unlikely that those playlists would still receive traffic, if they don't show up in the main search results. Speaking of user-curated playlists, we've seen succeeding those playlists which are ranking for keyword niches, where Spotify doesn't have playlists.
There is a slight possibility that user-curated playlists can even outrank officially curated playlists, those playlists are usually curated by (affiliates) of major labels with insane promotion budgets. Another point we want to mention is that if you take a look at the account of a playlist curator and you notice that he has for example several playlists with for example 60.000 followers, it is very likely that those are botted. Getting a playlist featured on the main result position happens very rarely and even if you'd be lucky to rank more playlists, they wouldn't grow in the same tempo. If the playlist names also show a pattern, you've very likely uncovered a cool guy's botted playlists.
Spotify Organic Playlists
From our experience, playlists from accounts that are natural-looking, from people who can actually be found online, sometimes not even knowing why their playlist receives so much traffic, are the sample example of organic playlists. Their playlists usually have been featured on the main search result position years ago, and as they were always gaining the most traffic, they never really lost the main search result position for their tag. As artists ourselves, we've been in touch with more than 2.500 of such independent Spotify curators within the past 3 years, building amazing relationships. They are the people who run the niches playlists that grow organically as the majority of them have never even wasted a thought of botting.
Benefits of promoting through us:
As your promotion begins, we provide the opportunity to check your own Spotify for Artist insights and see where the listeners are coming from. Your song will be played across numerous devices worldwide, producing natural, organic growth for your music.
After years of clients using our Spotify services to safely, organically promote their songs we have never seen any client been banned from any streaming platform. As we want to maintain our playlist network, we can decide which songs we feature in a balanced and organic way.
This is why we retain the rights to decline songs that would not perform well in our playlists. In case we are not going to work with a song, the client will be fully refunded. Feel free to check our Spotify playlist packages here.