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Why artist.tools is awesome for artists, labels and curators
Andrew Southworth
October 14, 2024
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about the Spotify music analytics platform artist.tools!
If you haven’t heard of it before, artist.tools is a platform where you can research Spotify playlists to see if they’re safe or botted. But additionally it has some other awesome features:
Tracking follower growth over time
Estimating monthly listeners on a playlist
Checking which keywords the playlist is organically ranking for on Spotify
Finding contact information for playlists
Before we dive in, I want to mention that i’ll be in Amsterdam for ADE this week! If you’re also attending and want to meet up, reply to this email or message me in the ADE Pro messaging system.
Artist.tools for artists
Artist.tools has plenty of features that are great for labels, curators and marketers (which we’ll get into next), but there are plenty of features that are great for artists too. In fact, the pricing of artist.tools is one reason I often tell artists to use it over something like Chartmetric (which while also a great tool, is VERY expensive).
I pay $140/mo for Chartmetric, and while it’s worth it for what I do it’s a hard pill to swallow for music artists. Here’s the pricing for artist.tools on an annual plan:
First, one of the simplest features you can use is detecting if you’re currently on any likely botted playlists.
For example you can see that Taylor Swift is on 248 botted playlists (pretty much every huge artist will be on a bunch), and we can look at her playlists tab to see the exact playlists:
As an artist, you can use this to detect if a playlist curator is legit before you hire them. Or you can use it to evaluate existing playlists you’re already on, and make sure you get off of any botted ones.
Keep in mind the bot detection isn’t perfect. Ideally you’ll pair the artist.tools assessment with your own personal assessment in Spotify for Artists to decide if a playlist is likely botted or not. But i’ve found it to be pretty reliable in most cases.
Another useful feature is if you find a playlist that’s a good fit for your music, perhaps by looking at which playlists larger artists in your genre are on, you can find their contact information in many cases:
You can see for the playlist above we have an IG handle, a Groover link and a SubmitLink link, as well as a simple pitch we can copy and paste so we can easily submit to the playlist.
artist.tools for curators, labels, marketers
As an ‘industry’ person, likely a playlist curator, label owner, marketer etc, you’ll find the platform even more valuable. Of course all the artist features are still useful, such as finding playlists, seeing if they’re legit and getting contact information.
One super common application I see is using their Keywords page to try and get playlists to rank organically on Spotify. Looking at the same playlist we looked at above…
The playlist is ranked #1 in the USA for the search term ‘beach chill’ and also ‘beach chill 2024’. Essentially each search term has an approximate monthly search volume, and you can have a certain ranking for each search term. In a perfect world you’d have a #1 ranking for a very high volume search term.
If you’ve ever heard of ‘SEO Spotify playlists’ this is essentially how it works. It’s similar to how Google ranks websites and blog posts.
Next, let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad campaign to grow your playlists and you want to track follower growth over time as well as average popularity index. You could of course do this manually, but artist.tools does it for you.
One thing you couldn’t do on your own, is track competitor’s playlists over time. You can see how their followers have grown and what keywords they’re ranking for. You can see which playlists are featured for specific artists, and reverse engineer to try and get your artist on those playlists.
New Content
In this video i'll show you how to do a waterfall release strategy with DistroKid, what a water release strategy is and why its useful for music marketing.
Spotify playlists can be a small part of your marketing plan but they shouldn’t be the bulk of it, here’s why:
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
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🎬 Get 15% off Melodist music distribution with code ANDREW15 here
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