Pros & Cons Of Guaranteed Playlist Pitching Services: An Honest Review

Many times artists are searching for Spotify playlist placement services simply because that’s what they believe they’re supposed to do.

But once you analyze what the artist is trying to get out of the service, you sometimes find that either Instagram or YouTube is a better suited platform. 

While it is important to have some activity on Spotify, at the moment it is not the best direct to consumer platform. 

As an independent artist, many times you want to have interaction with your fans (comments, direct messages, and followers). Spotify does not have a comments section or any messages between the artist and audience without paying for audio ads.

And if you’re not a seasoned marketer, audio ads are a struggle to achieve a ROI on.

We made this video that runs you through the pros and cons of each platform.

Playlist pitching is good as long as your expectations are logical. You’ll mostly experience a rise in streams, listeners and saves during the time of pitching, but will not see as many followers as you would doing an Instagram ads promotion or YouTube campaign. 

Submithub is the most hands off of all the services. You will find a list of different curators and influencers for Spotify, YouTube, & Instagram with notes and quick facts about some highs and lows. However, there is not much consultation about which path an artist should allocate their ad spend dollars in the first place. Also, the process can be tedious to submit to each curator and influencer individually.

Additionally, while they have low cost pricing for submissions, this leads to a much lower acceptance rate for playlist placement. 

To be fair, this could also be due to artists submitting to playlists they shouldn’t be submitting to in the first place, which is why the other two services act as a liaison between artists and curators to help the efficiency of the process.

Playlist Push is more hands on where you can select different pricing packages and submit to a pool of curators with one click. 

While it is more expensive to submit this way, the acceptance rate tends to be higher than Submithub. They also compensate their curators more generously than Submithub does, which in turn would naturally lead to happier and more generous curators (one would think). 

However, Playlist Push is just that, a playlist pushing service and not as much a one stop shop for the proper advice and consultation that many artists don’t realize they need until after they’ve already paid a substantial amount in promotion dollars.

Omari (us) provides the widest array of services for artists including Spotify playlist pitching, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook ad management and optimization, Instagram influencer promotion, Apple Music playlist pitching, YouTube Subscriber Optimization & Website Design & Management services.

For Spotify, we’re different because we have a guaranteed minimum number of playlists we’re trying to reach for each campaign level and will continue pitching your song until it’s completed. 

We also have a phone number available where you can call and talk to a real human being (shocker, we know).

We do this because we know the ins and outs of each platform and which of them is best suited for your specific goals, so we have email, live chat, text, DMs and calls available so you can reach us. 

While we love a good playlist pitch (and have placed thousands and thousands of songs across just about every genre you can think of on playlists), what we love even more is making sure that where you’re putting your music marketing dollars will stretch it the furthest possible.

Let’s take a look at the breakdown of where your ad spend should typically go depending on different marketing objectives.

If you’re looking for followers, Instagram ads are your best bet. People are more generous hitting the follow button on IG than any other platform, and we’ve spent well over $200,000 in ad spend on Facebook & Instagram to know this. 

YouTube would be the second best option because you can still add additional messaging to your videos such as pinned comments, end screens, descriptions, video cards, and intros and outros to influence listeners into hitting the subscribe button on your channel. 

Instagram influencer promotion may lead to some followers, but it is more volatile than running IG ads. 

All in all, here’s a standard recommended budget spend if followers are your main goal:

• 50% of budget towards IG ads spend
• 25% of budget towards YouTube promotion
• 10-15% of budget towards Spotify promotion (this is done to help influence your audience, while Spotify playlist promotion yields much more saves than followers, having your numbers up on Spotify does influence how people perceive your music and the likelihood that they take you seriously as an artist)
• 10-15% of budget towards IG influencer promotion or SoundCloud (for electronic genres) for testing purposes. If one of them starts to work better than another platform, then ad spend should be increased.