This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's listener wants to curate playlists on Spotify and get paid for it. Is that a thing? We're gonna talk about that today. Welcome to Citus Hill School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
So glad you're here. I've been making this podcast for more than 1400 days, bringing you lots of stories, tips, case studies from the world of making extra money without quitting your job. That is our collective mission and I'm very grateful for our global community. Now, a little background on this topic, for those who aren't familiar with Spotify playlists, whenever you listen to Spotify, if you go to the home screen, you can see a large group of playlists. And this is kind of like, if you're not sure what to listen to, well, we've got a playlist designed for you by mood, by genre, probably some other categorization.
And the key point here is some of these playlists are official, like Spotify runs them, while others are created by users. And in fact, I think the ones by users, there's a lot more of those than there are the official ones. So anyone can create and share a public playlist, but the question is, this we're gonna talk about, is there a way to get paid for such a thing? And the best answer is, maybe. I'll explain more after this message from our sponsor and the question from our listener, how to make money from Spotify playlists.
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Hi Chris, this is Riley from Minneapolis. And I just discovered your show recently from a friend and I've been enjoying the content, thanks. My question is, how can I make money from playlists? I read an article about how some Spotify playlists that have hundreds of thousands of followers are able to charge musicians to have their songs featured there. It doesn't seem like Spotify is happy about this, but it also seems widespread.
I'm a DJ and I've been toying with the idea of trying to build up a popular playlist. How many followers do you think I need to charge for placement and how would I go about doing this? Both in terms of building the popularity of the list and then selling the placement to artists without getting in trouble with Spotify. I'm looking forward to your response. [Music]
Riley, thank you for calling in.
Thank you for the interesting question. I don't think we have ever talked about Spotify playlists and I've actually been interested in this as well. I've read a couple of articles on it. So here's what Riley is referring to just in case anybody's not clear. So I talked about playlists a bit in the introduction and some of these playlists that are very popular with hundreds of thousands of followers or even millions of followers, it can be a really big deal for an artist to get a song on one of those playlists.
Getting featured on the right playlist is going to get them a lot of exposure, a lot of plays or streams which are counted. So there's always this visual metric as an artist. You can see how many times my song has been played. And then I also noticed as I was reading and preparing to answer this question, company curated playlists only account for 20% of all playlists on the platform, at least that was the case a couple of years ago. So it is in fact true what I said at the beginning of how user playlists are, there's actually a lot more of those than the official ones.
So if you take all those facts together, it suggests that there is a possible market for curating a popular playlist and then charging artists to be listed on it. Now it is important to note, as Riley pointed out, Spotify doesn't like that. So pay to play is against their terms. It's not like it's illegal, it's just they don't like it. So, and they can set the rules because it's their platform.
So from time to time they will delist anyone they catch doing it. However, it's such a massive listening audience. I mean, I don't even know the global numbers of Spotify listeners, but there's so many people and so many playlists that it seems you really only get in trouble if you're really, really successful and also not careful about it. So it's not a question of legality, it's a question of ethics, a bit of a gray area. But if you do want to do this, that's kind of on you, how would you do it?
I think there are three main steps. First, you want to build a great playlist. Ultimately, content is the most important. Riley mentions that she is a TJ. Well, go and check out a lot of the playlists that are out there and ask yourself, what could I do that's different or better or unique?
What kind of music can I focus on? Then number two, you want to attract followers to the playlist. So you want to try to bring anybody that you know, any social media influence you have, you want to try to encourage people to subscribe. But also the name of the playlist is really, really important because a lot of them are discovered by people searching. So I have stumbled on a bunch of playlists just by searching random terms.
So think long and hard about what the name of your list is. And then ultimately, if you want to pursue Riley's idea and get paid, you'll need to partner with a third party service, a third party promotional service. And there's a bunch of those out there. I don't want to say the names of any of them because who knows, they might not be around in a while. But if you Google Spotify promotion, you're going to go down a rabbit hole and find a lot of different links.
And typically the way it works there is they will send you tracks to review. You get 72 hours to add or reject them. So if you don't like a song, you don't have to put it on your playlist, which is good. And the price you get paid directly relates to the number of followers, which is why that's so important. Playlists with half a million followers, for example, have been able to charge $2,000 for placement.
But most playlists aren't nearly that large. So the price begins very low. It's just five to $10 for new playlists. So that is a bit of background information. If you want to go down that road further, I'd highly suggest you do a bunch of other reading just because this is a world that changes rapidly.
So who knows, maybe Spotify will actually come around or create a version where it's totally fine with them to do this, or maybe not. So check it out, do your own research. And listeners, if you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We're going to continue to feature them throughout the rest of the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch and grow their projects. Thank you again.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." ♪ I'm gonna fall ♪ [Music]
From the Onward Project.
