Inside Stories: SongRocket Could Be The Easiest Way To Get Playlisted
You’re probably fed up with features, advices and tips & tricks emphasizing on how important is for your music to get placed into editorial playlists as well as independent ones.
Things look pretty straightforward when talking about editorial playlists: create an amazing pitch via Spotify For Artists platform, work with an established distributor and pray for stars to be aligned, so your music would resonate with the playlist curators. Yet, when we turn to independent playlist curators, we are forced to enter the black hole of playlist pitching. It looks kinda scary and discouraging on your first encounter. There are literally tens of thousands of playlists (if not more) and the process of filtering down these playlists to find the ones with real & active followers in order to avoid fake streams and low level scams is a time-consuming hell!
This is where services like SubmitHub or Groover are thriving: set a budget, filter the playlists by genre, rank, user feedback a.s.o. and fire up your campaign, hoping that you nailed the right genre and wrote the perfect pitch, so you can have a good acceptance rate. Could the playlists pitching game become even more easy to handle?
Lukas, founder of SongRocket, thinks there is an easier way. SongRocket.com, launched in April 2021, promises to speed up the process of pitching music to carefully selected curators. Over 170 curators with a combined followers count of over 11 million listeners, to be more precise.
Luk is no stranger to the music world: he fell in love with electronic music almost 25 years ago and this passion brought him behind the decks of some top clubs in Switzerland. He also started to produce his own tracks, gathering more than 2.5 million streams on Spotify using nothing than his own promotional efforts. SongRocket was born as a solution to address the painful job of pitching music to independent curators: with a budget as low as 6 USD you can start your own pitch in minutes, just by uploading the track information and choose from a pretty extensive list of musical genres. If you would like to test SongRocket, make sure you use Soundfeedapp code at checkout to receive a complimentary 10% discount (valid for 1 whole month) ;)
We sat down for a nice chat with Luk, to find out more about the sometimes unfair playlisting game, about his way of curating music for his own playlists and about the music scene as it is today. Enjoy! 👇
Since when is music an integral part of your life?
It all started back when I was 15 years old, when I tried to spin my first vinyl.
How did you end up becoming a music curator?
I actually bought a book from Mike Warner, he is an independent artist, curator and the go-to person when it comes to playlist strategies on music streaming services.
So that’s where all started back in 2019 when I did my first playlist ever.
Please describe a bit more in depth SongRocket. What does it bring new to the playlist pitching table, with all these pitching services we have right now?
It might be the first pitching service made from an artist perspective. I know what to look for in a playlister because I’m building a community rather than just another platform. I also try to bring more quality in the network: record labels with playlists and individuals which make sense to me.
What criterias do you use when including various playlists and curators into SongRocket?
Besides of growth and activity, I check also who is behind it, as there are many strange playlists. I also declined a lot of lists which just don’t fit SongRocket needs. I’m also not a big fan of any Netflix or TV related show playlists 😒
What drives you to curating music platlists? What’s your motivation?
Well I think besides of creating music I also want to be part of music Influencers: there are too many Instagram influencers out there but not many music influencers, so why not giving it a try?
Can playlisting be a full-time job? Is it for you?
I think depends on where you live, but it can be a full-time job. For me with SongRocket and my own music, yes, it became a full time job.
How can you sustain yourself, financially, from doing playlists? In order to keep doing this as a professional activity…
You need also to invest into playlists: not only time but also money for marketing like ads to keep them growing. A lot of people are doing this besides a regular job.
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What are you looking for in a track to add it to your playlist?
The quality of the tracks! It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to sound right all together, so you can tell something touched it. I also think it has never been easier to create tracks than today.
What tools and methods do you use to discover new music?
I Shazam a lot of tracks, I also go through other playlists and try to find more independent artists.
What does a good song pitch mean to you when you are approached by artists?
Well, you can tell if it’s just a copy paste thing or really try to pitch the song… how they came up with or how it’s already performing, where the song has been placed already (maybe some editorials etc.). I take all these things into account, but at the end does it touch me enough personally? That’s the final question.
How many daily submissions do you receive and how do you handle all this volume?
About 100-200 per week, so it’s quite time consuming and I can’t respond to all of them, I just go through the tracks.
Sometimes people come back asking if I had a listen which is a good reminder, actually.
What is your strategy to grow the number of followers / subscribers for your playlists? Organically, paid…
Well I can’t tell my strategy obviously :) But one and most known is for sure paid ads through social media.
Are you building or have you considered building a record label around your playlist activity?
Yes that’s actually something I would consider doing maybe in 2022.
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Would it be better for the industry (not just for you) if Spotify and other platforms allow charging for playlist placement? Who would this benefit mostly? The big spenders or the quality?
Payola is not new, that did happen in the past already with radio and think is still present in some way, but I’m totally against it as I think every good artist deserve to get heard worldwide, also in radio.
Do you think that having a song placed into independent playlists helps to trigger Spotify’s algorithms in any way, just to push it maybe into Discover Weekly or other algorithmic playlist?
Yes that’s for sure, I wouldn’t say that if that wasn’t the case with me: my algorithmic playlists pop up every 24h and this has been proven the right way to go.
How do you feel about DSPs algoritmic playlists. Is it fair competition?
Yes it is, the more engagement you have (playlistings or saves), the more algorithmic playlists you are on.
How do you feel about major labels playlist operations (Warner, Sony, Digster)?. Is it a fair competition against independent playlists? Is this (placement of own label content) a masked form of monetising playlists?
Yeah it is fair. I mean, it helps themselves for their own tracks, they also started when Spotify launched around that time, the competition of independents is getting higher though.
Imagine this: if all independent playlists wouldn’t exist, many mid size labels would just disappear. It’s also needed though, not sure what percentage it takes overall but for sure in 2 digits percentage.
Apart from this, what do you do for a living?
It’s all about music
The if it’s all about music, let’s make a playlist together, to get to know you from the musical point of view 👇
The Song that got your attention in the past weeks: I would say even this year as of yet and pitched to SongRocket is this one
One track that has proved to be a real success when pitched through SongRocket: the most successful as of yet with 90% approve rates (not budget size related) are these ones.
One Spotify playlist you listen often: my Shopping List playlist ;)
You can follow Luk on instagram. SongRocket is also on instagram here