The streaming service is essential for artists to get started. We reveal how you can reach your goal more easily.
With 210 million paying users and a total of 515 million global users, Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world. With these dizzying numbers, it’s hardly surprising that the company is not only the market leader, but also has a decisive influence on our listening habits.
Walkman, Discman and even MP3 players have been replaced by smartphones as the most common mobile music player. With one click, users can always find what they want to hear. And where the radio program or MTV used to influence who reached the top of the charts, today it’s the streaming numbers on the Swedish online service that count.
The last point is particularly interesting because an algorithm now determines the success of what we hear and what we don’t. So what does it take to make a breakthrough as a musician in the digital age? We’ll tell you which tricks you can use to easily hack Spotify’s algorithm – without any IT knowledge.
How does the Spotify algorithm work?
The algorithm that Spotify uses to compile your music recommendations is controlled by an artificial intelligence called BART. BART is an acronym that stands for “Bandits for Recommendations as Treatments”. Even though the German name may seem confusing, BART’s role with the streaming service makes all the more sense. The AI ensures that users continue to listen to music, and it achieves this by recommending more and more new songs. Three factors are crucial for this: analysis of lyrics and song content, the mood of a song, and finally comparisons between new tracks and previous listening habits. The AI analyzes the individual tastes of listeners and always delivers new songs in addition to well-known songs. It is important that listeners always remain engaged.
Anitta’s fans showed how to trick Spotify
Once you as a musician understand how BART works, artificial intelligence is actually relatively easy to outsmart. Because like all social media platforms, the statistics count. BART constantly monitors the hundreds of millions of users on Spotify and analyzes their listening habits. But like every AI that has existed so far, this one is not (yet) omniscient. For example, fans of the Brazilian singer Anitta found out how easy it is to outsmart BART and promote an artist to the top position.
The X account “GQ da Anitta” called for the Brazilian to be promoted to top artist. The measures: Listeners should create more and more playlists with songs by Anitta using changing accounts. The fan account even distributed free premium accounts for Spotify and gave an introduction on how to outsmart BART. Instead of putting Anitta’s songs on repeat or shuffle, her songs should simply be distributed across multiple playlists with other artists. Otherwise, BART would have registered the Brazilian musician’s increased hearing values as bots and not counted them.
The trick ultimately paid off. The Spotify users, mainly based in Brazil, managed to make Anitta the first Latin American musician to reach the pole position of all artists on the streaming service in March 2022.
This way you can fool the algorithm
So if you’re thinking of giving your music career a boost in this way, all you need to do is follow a few simple hacks to outsmart BART.
1. The Playlist Hack
Be inspired by Anitta’s fans and ensure that your listeners save your songs to as many playlists as possible. Ask friends, family, and everyone you know if they put one of your songs at the top of their playlists. If everything goes smoothly, your titles will soon appear in the “Weekly Playlists” or in the “Release Radar”.
2. “Engage your audience”
As with every social media platform, the motto “engage your audience” also applies to Spotify. Treat your Spotify profile like Facebook, X or Instagram. Regularly releases new songs and doesn’t wait too long to release an album – it can be one record every two years. It’s not your genre that determines popularity, but the high frequency of your publications.
3. The “30 Second Rule”
The first impression counts, even with Spotify. Whether listeners listen to your songs to the end or skip ahead after just a few seconds is crucial to your success. The Spotify algorithm ignores all tracks that are not listened to for longer than 30 seconds. So make sure that your creative outpourings ignite right from the start and that the users stay tuned.
4. Timing is everything
Become per day Approximately 120,000 new songs released on Spotify. These include big and unknown artists. To ensure that your works don’t get lost in the oversupply, you should be particularly careful not to release them at the same time as the superstars. New releases from Taylor Swift or The Weeknd regularly generate streaming numbers in the 100 million range. So pay attention to when the big musicians announce their latest content and fill in the gaps in between.
5. Insider tip: The SEO trick with artist names
Music critic and YouTuber Anthony Fantano, aka TheNeedleDropalerted: Musicians allegedly use the names of other artists in their song titles to outsmart the algorithm’s search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization, or also abbreviated as SEO (stands for: “Search Engine Optimizing”), refers to methods that make content on the Internet more visible to Google and other search engines. Terms or combinations of them that are searched for particularly frequently will then appear first. BART also works in this way when it ranks playlists or podcasts or shows them first in the search bar. Parameters such as descriptions but, above all, frequently searched words that appear in song or album titles count. And if your song “coincidentally” bears a part or a modified form of the name of a popular artist, you are guaranteed the top spot in Spotify’s search engine.
According to Fantano, the UK rapper Central Cee is said to have taken advantage of the popularity of his US colleague Doja Cat to push his 2022 single “Doja”. If this is the case, the scam was successful. To date, Central Cee’s “Doja” has racked up nearly half a billion streams.