PlaylistSupply Team Chats About Spotify Playlists, Data, and Music Streaming

PlaylistSupply is a tool designed to help artists and their teams find relevant playlists faster and make the whole process more efficient.

Benjamin Stein, the CEO and co-founder of PlaylistSupply, has stated that the tool is “is super effective for niche genres and anyone looking to increase their Spotify traffic.”

He added: “Since inception, we now have people from renown management companies and major labels using the tool to supplement their digital release strategies.”

According to Stein, PlaylistSupply is built to include complex algorithms to find playlists faster and more efficiently. Specific search options are available in the dropdown for people hunting down emails, social media accounts for DM, or similar artist playlists for better targeting or A&R purposes.

Stein and his team were nice enough to answer a few of our questions about PlaylistSupply; how they started, the state of the music-tech business, and what they have planned for the future.

P&S: What was the jumping-off point to launch PlaylistSupply?

PlaylistSupply started as an artist manager’s answer to the age-old question of “How to get on Spotify Playlists”.

It was an idea from a small team of artists, managers, and booking agents looking to make Spotify Playlisting more accessible. The goal of Playlist Supply was to make a playlisting option for indie artists who might not have a major record deal or big budget for marketing.

After being discouraged by bad experiences with most of the submission services and playlisting companies our team decided to reach out to curators individually on our own. What started as manually hunting down contact information and curators from popular Spotify playlists for personal management clients quickly turned into a software tool that would automatically find all of the spotify playlists’ data, emails, social handles, and a ton of other next level information.

This could be used to strategize mass outreach to Spotify Playlists for new releases, boosting algorithmic playlists with release day playlist adding, and monitoring all kinds of analytics about playlists. You can do a search, find thousands of playlists, and export them or save them to your database within your profile!

Our team started by beta testing our tool with A&R’s, artist managers, and marketing teams at record labels / distribution companies. The consensus was that PlaylistSupply was a game changer for artists outreaching to Spotify playlists and also a powerful data tool for labels.

We wanted to give this power to independent artists and we took the tool online. We started with beta testing and eventually the word of mouth about PlaylistSupply spread. If you search our tool on TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, you will see tons of artists and music marketing experts explaining how to use PlaylistSupply to grow your audience and fanbase. It is available to anyone for just shy of $20 monthly and you can sign up at www.playlistsupply.com/.

P&S: Were there any notable obstacles in getting PlaylistSupply up and running?

When we first started many artists and managers were surprised that a tool like Playlist Supply was not available before. The biggest obstacle we faced is explaining that PlaylistSupply is a revolutionary Software tool for artists and not a pitching service. We made playlisting accessible to any artist, band, musician, or whoever may want to reach out to Spotify playlists.

We provide a productivity and research tool for Spotify playlists which can be used in a multitude of ways from determining quality playlists to genre research and playlist database creation. This does not require any minimum budget and for the cost of the tool you can actually download or save unlimited amounts of data. You can export every search and now save them to your profiles database where they can be monitored and re-accessed.

Many of these pitching services start at hundreds without any guarantees at all. You have to buy tokens or just hope for the best. Reframing how playlisting works has proven one of the most difficult obstacles. Providing Playlist Supply as a resource to do Spotify Playlist outreach yourself instead of paying someone else to do it is a new approach.

P&S: How do you see the music-tech landscape changing over the next 5–7 years?

In the coming years we expect Spotify to expand their Playlisting in a huge way. Just recently I read a techcrunch article talking about how Spotify will begin choosing independent user generated playlists to become curator playlists. The Featured Curators feature is a way for user-created playlists on Spotify to have a place next to the Spotify Editorial playlists. This would completely change the game in terms of who has access to curators. Now instead of just major labels getting viral editorial playlists, indie artists will have more access to playlists and these pivotal playlists.

PlaylistSupply is planning on releasing a game changing new feature that will allow you to research contact information for these highlighted Featured Curators playlists. As a result, artists will be able to actively promote their music directly to these user-created playlists which possess as much importance as the editorial playlists.

P&S: Would you agree that — as we look ahead — data will only become more and more vital across the board in the industry — — PR, artists, curators, labels, streaming platforms, etc… Is it truly a secret sauce?

Yes. I fully agree. Data is powerful. Nearly all of the major record labels are already using data tools, scrapers, and bots behind the scenes. For independent artists, staying creative and adaptive to new tech will allow you to be ahead of the curve. With the internet I don’t believe anything is really “secret” anymore. You can do research, find tools like Playlist Supply, and find ways to access and strategize your data.

P&S: Who is your typical user of the data tool?

The typical Playlist Supply user is an Independent Artist, Indie Artist Manager, Records Label Project Manager, and anyone trying to market music by getting music onto Spotify playlists or research data about Spotify Playlists.

We have basically every genre represented in our user base along with people from most music industry companies as well.

P&S: What are your thoughts on the music streaming business as a whole?

The way music has transitioned to streaming focused as a whole is really interesting to me. I think that the increased accessibility to artists being heard is incredible but it comes with some pitfalls. Traditional A&R mentality is disappearing as people focus more on the streaming numbers.

This was one reason we created Playlist Supply. It provides a way to more directly target Spotify listeners. Streaming has been more or less monopolized by Spotify

which means you have to find platform specific ways to market, like playlisting. Streaming has made the barrier to entry much lower as anyone can download a DAW and upload music via an online distro company like Tunecore. You can submit an editorial with Spotify for an artist but unless you’re Kendrick Lamar the odds are against you because everyone is submitting as well.

PlaylistSupply allows you to do playlisting on your own terms and build relationships yourself with curators similar to the way labels do. As you’ll notice the new Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is on every Spotify editorial playlist during the week of release. Spaces in these playlists are given priority to artists who are already established. PlaylistSupply caters to smaller artists looking to get heard but who may not be getting these editorial playlists on their early releases.

P&S: What’s on the horizon for PlaylistSupply? What plans do you have looking ahead for the business?

On the horizon we have a host of new updates that make it even more efficient to find and outreach to Spotify Playlist Curators. We just released a huge new update that includes features for selecting and saving playlists to your own Playlist Directory where they can be refreshed and updated to see & monitor changes in the follower count and other statistics over time.

This is super advantageous because it allows artists and managers to filter out any playlists that have obvious bot follower activity or weird fluctuations within the various data points. Spotify with new features like its Featured Curators beta program and others will provide new angles that we can strategize data from and make playlisting easier & more accessible.

Our goal is to continue to develop and provide software tools for artists and managers that put the power of data at their fingertips. Since the inception of PlaylistSupply we have seen a host of copy-cats. When we started to see these sites copying our code pop up with eerily similar names, PlaylistMap, PlaylistParrot, PlaylistHunter, our team took it as flattery and reason to stay sharp.

Our new music tech software was making waves. PlaylistSupply was an innovative solution to a problem we had as managers and we are continuing to approach music-tech as a way of problem solving within the music industry.

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