Your First Release on Spotify: How to Train the Algorithm So Every Next Song Does Better

You know what makes me nervous? First releases.

Since I started Release Like a Label, a lot of musicians have been coming to me with their first song ever, and I stress about those way more than I stress about someone who already has a catalog.

But it's the good kind of stress, don't worry. The good kind of stress.

There are two reasons for that. They don't know a lot of things yet and I'm basically their entrance into this whole world. And their expectations are usually sky high, so on every call I'm kinda trying to bring them back down.

So the first thing I tell them is that you have to test a few songs before you know which one is your "Shape of You" (that Ed Sheeran song).

The first one might not be the one people connect with, as much as you love it yourself.

And the second thing is that Spotify has ZERO information about you right now.

I'll help you train it, but your next releases are going to do better than this one, because it builds.

So here's what you do, because I heard you like practical tips.

Social media: test before you release

You use social media to test your music before you release it and see how people react to it. Then you take the videos that worked and use them as ads, so you're not paying to test something twice.

Make 26 videos per song, with the same part of the song every time, and change only the hook. If you run out of hook ideas, Content Buddy, my free tool, writes them for you.

I forgot to mention that you're also training the Instagram and TikTok algorithm, and sometimes it takes them 100+ posts to catch up.

Playlists: tell Spotify your genre

With a small budget you go SubmitHub, and with a bigger budget you go Playlist Push.

You're using the playlists to train the Spotify algorithm, by putting your song next to songs from similar artists, and that's the only way you can tell Spotify what your genre is.

I feel like a lot of musicians struggle with this one. If you can't define your genre, what are you even doing here?

So go listen to similar artists and see what their genre is called, and get to a point where you know your subgenre and the vibe of your music without thinking about it.

(Pro tip: if you think you invented a genre, that's not going to work.)

Ads: keep the algorithm warm

You can put most of your budget into the first month of the release, to get quality listeners onto your playlist and more saves and engagement on Spotify.

Then, and this is the magic part, you keep running ads to your music on at least $5 a day between releases so the algorithm stays warm.

You don't want to gain listeners, fall back to 100, go up to 10,000, and then fall back to 100 again.

And the best thing you can do is make a "This Is ___" playlist with all your songs and send people there. You keep promoting the same best song with the ads, and you just change the link so it goes to the playlist instead of one single song.

If you want the numbers behind why ads and playlists work so well together, I wrote about save rates from playlists and Meta ads.

Spotify doesn't forget

So yeah, your first release is doing a lot of work even when the numbers look boring, because all of it stays there. The saves, the listeners, the ads and the playlists all count toward the next one.

It makes the second one easier and the third one way easier.

So take some of that pressure off the first song and start thinking about the next three.

And if you're planning your first release and you want it run the way a label would run it, that's what Release Like a Label is.