This is BFlat BSharp BNatural — a weekly newsletter on the unglamorous work of running a music project.
Playlist pitching. People either treat it like a mystery or like a scam. I'm here for the middle ground: a real strategy you can execute in an afternoon.
Your playlist targets aren't the big editorial ones.
Those are curated by Spotify's own team and they're not taking cold submissions from artists with 200 followers. Your real targets are independent playlist curators — usually one person, sometimes a small publication — who build audiences around a specific mood or genre and actually listen to what gets sent to them.
Here's how to find them.
Use Spotify itself. Go to your genre, find a playlist that fits your sound. Look up who runs it — most curators link to their social or email in the description. You're not looking for the playlist with 50,000 followers. You're looking for one with 500–5,000. Those curators open their emails.
Look for patterns in the playlist metadata. If you see a playlist called "Neo-Soul Sunday Vibes" and your song has soul elements, that's a match. But don't pitch every song to every playlist. The curators who get 50 emails a day can tell when you're doing a mass blast. Reference something specific: "Your 'Late Night Drive' playlist came up when I searched for lo-fi R&B and my track 'Midnight Mile in C Minor' has that exact energy." That's a real sentence because I just wrote it about a real song.
Platforms that help. SubmitHub and Groover are the two main ones. You pay a small fee ($1–$3) to submit to multiple curators at once. It's not a bribe — it's a processing fee for curators who otherwise get nothing. Both platforms show you each curator's response rate so you can skip the ones who never reply. Yes, the system has its issues. But it's better than blindly emailing and hearing nothing back for six weeks.
Timing matters. Submit your song at least 3–4 weeks before you want it live on the playlist. Most curators plan in advance. A submission that arrives two days before a curator's next scheduled update is a submission that gets archived.
The email itself. Short. Four sentences max:
- Who you are and where you're from
- What the song sounds like (specific reference, not "it's hard to describe")
- Why it fits their playlist specifically
- Link to the song + one sentence about your numbers if they're decent (streams, monthly listeners — don't lie)
That's it. No attachments. No press kit. They can click the link and hear it in 30 seconds.
What about Spotify's own submission tool?
Use it. In your Spotify for Artists dashboard, you can submit unreleased songs directly to Spotify's editorial team. Do this. It takes two minutes. Will they add you to a major editorial playlist? Almost certainly not on your first release. But the system learns. Every submission trains the algorithm a little more about who your audience is.
The playlist you're building yourself.
While you're pitching others, you're also building your own. Add your own songs to a private playlist. Share the link in your Instagram bio, your email signature, your bio. When people ask "what should I listen to first?" — you have an answer that's not just your artist page.
This week's move: pick three independent playlists that fit your sound. Write three emails. Send them. That's the whole strategy. Not glamorous, but it works.
Next week — sync licensing. What it is, why it matters, and whether it's worth your time.
— D