How Spotify Learns Your Audience

One of the most important things I tell artists I work with, is that you must allow Spotify to learn who your fans are. Who you think your fans are, and who they really are can be two separate markets.

For example, you may think your fans are 24-32 year old women in LA, but in reality your fans on Spotify are 18-24 year old men in Wyoming or Nebraska. So now Spotify has to learn more about you. Spotify is going to put your music in front of a lot of people, but it won't put it in front of TOO many people. They wanna know for sure that the people discovering your music are the right crowd, because it wants to keep it’s listeners happy. So to do that, it doesn't want to surprise it’s listeners with something they don’t vibe with.

So if your high energy rap song song goes into a playlist with Kota The Friend, that listener might go “what the hell is this?” if it’s not something they’re accustomed to listening to. They don't want that, and they will never risk that, so instead they'll start to collect data. When you release another song, they’ll collect more data on you. And maybe your track will go on release radar for ten people, and discover weekly for five. Then the following week you’ll be put on 25 people’s discover weekly. Then 500, on and on.

Spotify is testing your market and they're learning who likes it. When they put in front of 50 people and 30 like it, they’re like “good now with these 30 people who enjoy this song, let’s find a sample population similar to them and we’ll go from there.”