We understand the temptation for artists to pay third-party (i.e. not in-house curators) playlisters to have their music added to their playlists, but it’s a bad idea. It’s frowned upon by Spotify, and even if it generates streams in the short term, it’s not a good way of creating actual fans.
If you’re wobbling, Rolling Stone has a good feature outlining these and other drawbacks, including this from Michael Sloane of playlist-pitching firm Streaming Promotions.
“What we’ve seen from playlists that demand money is they might have a valuable playlist when they start that process, but within two months, it’s all garbage,” he said.
His company is helping to quantify the pay-for-playlisting ecosystem too: it has a spreadsheet of third-party playlists including a ‘do not contact’ tab for those who’ve asked for money, and that tab now has “a couple thousand entries”.
Photo by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash
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