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When your music is played on Spotify, you need to manage your profile with their Spotify for Artists interface. Beyond that, your artist profile allows you to track your fans’ listening habits and understand how to interact with your community. Ready to talk data and promotion? Let’s go!
To build its listening catalogue, Spotify partners with digital distributors and labels. You can’t create or edit your profile or upload your music directly as an artist; you have to go through one of these intermediaries.
Once you’re signed with a label or a digital distributor, you can access Spotify for Artists for free. If you are with a label, your manager or the label will usually handle your page. If you have created an account with a distributor like DistroKid, CD Baby or TuneCore, you gain access to Spotify for Artists through that account.
The app offers three types of services: your profile, your listening statistics and promotional tools. The challenge is to customise your profile and then analyse the stats and tweak your profile accordingly in order to promote yourself more effectively.
As an artist, you’ll need to go through a digital distributor – or your label if you’re signed – to create your profile and access Spotify for Artists. The programme includes your profile, your listening statistics and promotional tools. The idea is to attract people through your profile, then use your stats to help you promote your music.
It might sound obvious, but taking care of your profile is very important: it’s your showcase and a place to interact with the people who listen to you. It is your opportunity to synthesize your artistic style and the musical DNA that defines you and distinguishes you for your audience.
First, you get the verified profile status √ only if you have a Spotify for Artists account – a symbol of legitimacy and professionalism that reassures people who visit your profile. Other important visuals for the same reasons: your profile picture (small and round) and your banner (large and rectangular). Be sure to upload high-resolution images that represent your musical universe.
Then, you fill in your bio – the opportunity to talk about yourself as you wish, and to pitch your music, keeping in mind keywords that describe your inspiration and your feelings, or the feelings you seek to instil in others through your music. You can also write a live status to share a message with your community. It can be an opportunity to ask them a question or share a piece of news about your artistic activities.
Your Spotify for Artists profile consists of your bio and visuals. It’s an opportunity to synthesise your artistic style and the musical DNA that defines you and makes you stand out to your audience.
You can access information about your audience on three levels: all of your music uploaded to Spotify; track by track broadcast; for each playlist you publish. On each level and for the period of your choice (day, month, year), the range of information you can see includes :
With this data, you can figure out who is interested in your music and thus fine-tune your promo strategy, for example, by prioritising certain social networks according to their age, or certain topics in your lyrics according to their genre, by publishing playlists where you mix your tracks with those of the artists your audience listens to, by organizing your concert dates according to the cities where many of them live.
Your stats allow you to understand who listens to you, when, how, how often and from which city. They paint a picture of your audience, telling you what they like about your music, and helping you figure out the most appropriate ways for you to interact with them and keep them loyal. So you can go from an audience to a fanbase!
You can add a layer of polish to your Spotify profile by selecting a release of your choice as an Artist’s Pick, and pinning it as a priority to invite visitors to play it. You can also create your own playlists and then name and describe them in a few lines, with an image of your choice as a bonus, as an easy way to share your favourites, your inspiration and your own sounds.
On the songs side, the Canvas tool allows you to animate your tracks with videos or images – another way to assert your artistic personality, your universe. These are visible to the public almost immediately after uploading, so why not embellish even your old releases with this relatively new tool, and use it to tell a story in images from one song to the next.
There is also a concert section interfaced with online ticketing sites, where you can give details of your concert programme and invite your fans to buy tickets. If you want to keep track of your sales figures, you will find them in your dashboard. Don’t forget to update your status when you add concert dates so that people who visit your profile will read your message and be inspired to buy a concert ticket via your calendar.
Finally, you have two techy tools at your disposal: links to add to websites to insert a player with the song of your choice, and the possibility of paying Spotify to promote your releases in the ads that the platform broadcasts as part of its free offer.
Once you’ve set up your profile, you’ll probably wonder how to get on playlists. That is going to be the subject of a future article, but in the meantime, here’s a tip: one week before your release date, an alert will appear in your Spotify for Artists account, inviting you to pitch your song to a playlist curator; don’t hesitate to click on it and fill out the form carefully.
The promo tools in Spotify for Artists allow you to showcase your news, your latest releases and your concert dates, and to share playlists of your composition. The idea is to reinforce your visual and audio universe.
Spotify for Artists is Spotify’s dedicated creator app, so you can’t do without it to customise your page. The idea is to attract users through your profile, then use your stats to guide you in how best to promote yourself. It’s an opportunity to synthesise your musical DNA – what defines you and makes you stand out to your audience – but also to understand your audience, and figure out the most effective ways of interacting with them and building loyalty. So you can go from an audience to a fanbase!
