What are your experiences with "Payola" on spotify or other streaming services?
As far as I can tell, most of them are free of it.
It's strictly forbidden. Still - it exists. I know and experienced "Klangspot" that is demanding a 12€ fee to be heard. Just "to be heard" for the time-costs, no guaranteed playlist add. Still for me it's too much in the grey zone and way too much for listening to one piece. Still the add was effective - "relaxing work music". I'm cool with a return. Curating doesn't mean you have to listen to every piece and answer everybody sending you music. Submithub is doing great in my opinion with paying like 1-3€ for a feedback and possible playlist add within 48 hours. It's also fair to add music - if you like it- of the curator/other composers - called "trading" if forced.
Follow/listening to the playlist can be the lowest cost and it's super legit doing so.
I'm opening this thread to talk transparent about it. I've submited music to one playlist called "estudio y concentration" from Paula Caballero. She really told me she's taking a fee of 35€/$ per add in the top 50 for 8 months. I'm not sure if she's really serious about it or only meaning the placement position. Howsoever, while this being easy to do and seductive, this is absolute no go!! This is destroying every fair system around music and playlist support. If she's confirming it, I'm going to report it to spotify. Please always do so, if you experience this. Stay as fair as possible. It's our responsiblity to have it a free place. There are a lot of composers around here in the playlist - some more background about the add would be great to have within such forum.
Did you experience anything like that?
here's another payola playlist which place was offered to me in a message. same story: $ for playlist add and more $ for a better position. I assume the streams of it are also fake/scam. I see a lot of known artists inside. Please stop accepting such payola playlist places. Damaging us all. I tried to reach spotify and take it down.
I really don't trust anyone asking me for money for a playlist placement... but that's me i guess. Not saying they are all scams but i'm tempted to think they are filled with bots/fake streams and that's not something i'm interested in. I'd rather have fewer, legit, streams.
Hi guys. After I released my album last week I started getting approached via IG by a few different promoters and who would like every single thing I said or did and then messaged me to say they had added me to their playlist and if I wanted to keep using their service they would like $3 for the month. I told them that I was just starting out and experimenting with things but thank you anyway. I looked up the playlist and got a fairly nice amount of streams considering my small stream size so I was tempted.
The next day I woke up to check my new release numbers (Yes, a bit obsessive, it's a bit addicting to start I guess!) to find they had dropped by the exact number of streams from this one playlist which I guess had been pulled from spotify!
This gave me a scare as I didn't want to get a takedown so I reported it to my distributor who has contacted spotify for me just in case. I'm glad I never got involved.
I have only used submithub (Thanks again Adrien!), Groover a little bit and now learning FB ads which are giving quite nice early results.
Moral of the story - The shiny object that looks to good to be true is probably a turd!
Thanks for all the support again everyone
Ooooh spicy one, thanks for bringing this up man! To be honest, I've been really tempted to try these "services". I understand the incentive, but I realized it would not necessarily be a good thing, even for the artist himself. The only barrier to enter a playlist should be quality, not money. If you pay to enter a playlist (payola), you have no guarantee that it has good content, and you might just screw your own algorithm. That's why I like Submithub : it removes the financial bias on the curator, and you know you've been added because someone genuinely liked the song. Theoretically, I guess the Klangspot submission process is legit because the curator's judgment isn't biased (edit : actually this is questionable because 12$ still is a decent amount of money...) . We just need to be mentally prepared of spending money without a guaranteed result, just like Submithub.
Here's an experience I had : I once noticed a classical playlist that was doing decent, and the curator had shared his contact info in the description, so I wrote to him. He answered telling me that he could add my song to the list for a fee that goes up to 20$ for a month "(...) otherwise, it will be unfair to other artists" (lol). He also included some screenshot from Playlist Push to show me stats on the playlist. I answered : "Unfortunately, there's something I don't understand. According to your screenshots you are on Playlist Push, which is a legitimate business. So why would you ask for a direct transfer ?" I then shared the official Spotify position on the matter : https://artists.spotify.com/blog/behind-the-playlists-your-questions-answered-by-our-playlist-editors He then apologized, congratulated me on my ethical behavior, and offered me a free spot on the list.
So... sometimes being the nice guy can work.