Playlisting in music streaming has completely changed how we listen to and share music. It is also highly effective at influencing how successful a song turns out to be.
The biggest problem with playlisting is figuring out where a song belongs. When pitching to Spotify’s editors, they make you identify elements of your music like mood and genre so their editors can better find a playlist spot for it. What happens if you get that wrong? It’s possible you don’t know where your song belongs best even though you’re the one that created it. Getting these keywords right will help match your song with curators for mood-focused playlists.
Fortunately, there is now free software that will analyze your song and help you uncover every element of your music. This tool is called Cyanite. Create a free account and upload your song’s master file. Cyanite can also analyze songs that are on Spotify already, but for our purposes, we want to analyze a song before it’s released.
Let me show you how to leverage Cyanite while pitching your music:
- Identify Your Song’s Genre & Mood
- After uploading and analyzing, Cyanite will spit out the moods and genres most prevalent throughout your song.
- Match Cyanite’s moods to Spotify’s moods. (Chart attached below)
- Select these Genres and moods when pitching your song to Spotify’s editors.
Cyanite has different Mood Keywords but they align perfectly.
- Get Your Descriptions Right
- Spotify asks for several different descriptions of your song when submitting to their editors, use these specific genres and moods when describing your song to them. This will help them align your song with the right editors.
- Use these keywords while writing your press releases to better describe the song so independent playlists, influencers, etc can quickly identify if your song is what they’re looking for.
- Identify Suitable playlists
- Now that you have this incredible information, plug these moods and genres into playlist tools like Chartmetric or SpotOnTrack to filter for independent playlists that work well with your song. Pre-pitch your song to them or wait until release day, either way, you will be ahead of schedule. The faster your song gets placed in playlists that work well for your song, the sooner you start getting support from algorithmic playlists.
- Search these keywords in our Music Creator Kit directories to find great playlists for your music.