Artist 101: How to Trigger Spotify’s Algorithm

As an up-and-coming artist, one should be aware of how your music will be promoted. Twentyfour-Eight & Co. believes that you as an artist should be equipped with all the knowledge that will make you successful. Here is a For Dummy’s crash course on how the Spotify Recommendation system works, and how you can benefit from this knowledge as you market yourself and your music.

To break it down, Spotify uses two methods to recommend a song: track representations and user representations. Within both representations, Spotify’s algorithm does a lot more work.

For track representation, Spotify’s algorithm uses two kinds of filtering: content-based and collaborative filtering. Content-based filtering is where the algorithm looks at the metadata of the song (track title, release title, artist name, credits, label, release date, mood tags, genre tags, language, etc.), analyzes the raw audio signals using three categories (danceability, energy, valence/positive-sounding), and language processing models (lyrical analysis, web-crawled data from music analyzers analyzing the song, and user-generated playlists names**). Collaborative filtering is where the algorithm compares users with each other to find similarities to recommend. For example, if a lot of people who listen to Taylor Swift also listen to Olivia Rodrigo, then Spotify will start to recommend those two artists together. 

For user representations, Spotify splits the feedback into two categories, explicit feedback (saves, playlist adds, shares, skips, etc.) and implicit feedback (listening session lengths, repeats, track playthroughs). 

It’s through combining all of this knowledge that Spotify is able to recommend you playlists, your weekly mixes, personalized content like search results, and more. So now that you know how Spotify works to recommend music, do you think you can figure out how to get recommended on the platform?

To make things even easier, follow our twelve-step process for triggering Spotify’s Algorithm;

1. Treat Your Spotify Account Like A Social Media Account

2. Upload Songs More Regularly

3. Point All Of Your Marketing At Spotify

4. Make Your Own Spotify Playlists

5. Add An Artist Pick On Your Profile

6. Create Artwork That Grabs Attention

7. Hyper Targeting With Advertising

8. Become The Master Of The Mixtape Playlist

9. Get A Pre-Save Link For Your Release

10. Utilize The Power Of Spotify For Artists

11. Get Users To Follow Your Artist Profile

12. Submit Your New Songs To Playlists