Let’s break down different elements of Spotify’s algorithm so you have a better understanding of how these platforms operate and recommend music.
Based on an audio file, RAW audio Analyzation looks at the beat, the tempo, the key, and sections of a track to match with other similar songs. This is a huge part of why Discover Weekly playlists are so consistent in recommending new songs you will enjoy.
“When you end up on a playlist, what determines your ability to stay on that playlist on a week-by-week basis is how many individuals are listening to your song on that playlist. This is why the number of saves and the ratio of fans who save your track while listening matter — why it’s the most important of all these actions.
Spotify checks for certain actions from users and stats: repeat listening, sharing a song with Spotify’s internal tools, number of complete streams on your songs (i.e., listening to a song for more than 30 seconds), number of skips/skip rate (i.e., percentage of people who don’t finish your song), number of saves/save rate (i.e., percentage of people who save your song to their collection).
Just like Google, Spotify crawls the internet with something called “Natural Language Processing” for artist mentions and searches. The more mentions, the more likely the artist is relevant to the public.
The pre-save functionality automatically adds your track to your fan’s Spotify library when that track is released. The more “saves” you get on release day, the more likely your track is to end up on one of Spotify’s algorithmic or editorial playlists in the following days.
There are multiple pre-save services that you can use. HyperFollow by Distrokid is very popular if you already use them for distribution. Feature.fm is a reliable free option. The Toneden.io suite of tools is a more premium option that includes a wonderful pre-save feature.
The Spotify Popularity Index is a 0-100 score that ranks how popular an artist is relative to other artists on Spotify. Spotify's Algorithm uses all the data points mentioned above to create this score for your song. If your score increases, you’ll get placed in more playlists.