Which playlists are considered as fake?
Those of which the followers are not real active users but bots
/ inactive accounts / accounts meant only for such
purposes.
Why is it bad getting into fake playlists?
Manipulating your stats with fake
followers, fake playlists and other black-hat techniques
is pointless. What you should be after as an artist are not the
number but the engagement. Engagement translates to REAL
interest. Big numbers without real interests lead to nowhere.
The major factors of the Spotify algorithm are not streams and
followers but listen-time (what percentage of your track's
duration is being streamed) and also saves/likes. Large Spotify
playlists can help you increase your metrics, but here’s the
thing: Many of the playlists out there are completely made up of
fake accounts, inactive accounts, that won't provide any real
streams to your song, or provide fake streams by being set to
"autoplay" or "autoloop". These scammers exploit artists by offering useless services.
That is affecting in a bad manner not only the artists but the
whole industry.
Why you should avoid fake playlists?
Spotify is the world’s largest music
streaming platform, and it’s a great place to build your fan base.
But the platform is also
dedicated to ban users that do not comply with the rules. Tactics like farm-bots, payola and fake streams
won't be tolerated. Once Spotify finds out, they will
immediately
take down your catalogue and your artist profile, so be very
careful to avoid illegitimate tactics. Spotify is constantly
analyzing how listeners react to your song and how often they
save/like it, or add it on playlist. The more users enjoy
or interact with your song, the more likely is that the
algorithm is going to recommend it furthermore. So, when you buy
fake streams, there is no real interaction or engagement, and
thus you are harming
your metrics, because Spotify sees that people (robots in our
case) listen to your track but they don't actually interact with it,
which means they don't particularly like it. And thus Spotify
will burry your track instead of recommending it furthermore.
Ways to spot real playlists
Each "alive" playlist, with a real audience of ~1000 followers, is more or less likely to
provide 3 to 15 streams per day to the tracks listed on top, and
less streams as we go down the playlist. The numbers vary as
circumstances are always different. You must understand that
the followers generated by an advertisement
won't be as interested and active as the fans that followed a
playlist organically because they discovered it by themselves.
Another example, roughly speaking, is a playlist with 100,000
followers for instance, which should be able to provide 250-1000
streams per day on a track placed on top of the playlist, 50-250
streams per day for the middle-class placements,
and less streams as we go down the playlist. Based on that stats you can
check the legitimacy of a playlist after a couple of days while
having a track added. If the playlist for example consists of
100,000 followers and your track gained only 3 streams per day,
then something is totally wrong with this playlist. Also, compare the
"listeners" to the "streams" of a track in your
Spotify for
artists section. If the playlist is legit, it should be able to
provide more streams than listeners, as some people tend to
replay the tracks they liked. Having the same amount of
listeners and streams is practically impossible and a red flag.
How do these services operate?
The scammers that offer fake streams &
followers use a lot of automated Spotify accounts to practice
their technique. But because they can’t connect all of these
accounts on the same
IP address, because that will make it obvious to Spotify that
they are bots, they spoof different IP addresses using data
centers. In order for Spotify to confirm and pay for a listen,
the track needs to play for least 30 seconds, otherwise Spotify
won't consider it as a valid stream. So scammers set their bots
to stream a track for a particular time-length, for instance, 35 seconds. But
even if they spoof IP addresses and stream a song for more than
30 seconds, Spotify is still able to identify these suspicious
activities, by examining for example how much time each track is being
streamed. It is irrational for a human being to play each song
for a specific 35 seconds and then skip to the next one. Spotify
identifies those streams. At the end you won’t get any royalties
from such streams. Keep in mind that the developers of Spotify
are much more skilled and sophisticated than the typical
underground scammers that are selling fake services.
Avoid "guaranteed" services
Your track’s performance in based on
various factors. None can predict and tell for sure how many
streams a track will gain, no matter how well-set the
circumstances are. Avoid any kind of service that promises
certain number of streams or followers. If Spotify finds out
that you’re getting fake followers or streams, you will be
banned, or blacklisted and miss the chance to appear on the platform’s
homepage or even search results.
General tips for selecting playlists
· Be skeptical about playlists that look
childish, without any professional or maturity in their
appearance or tracks.
· If a playlist provides more than 10
streams per day to a specific track, it appears on the
‘Discovered On’ section of the artist’s profile. So if you are
examining a playlist with 20,000 followers that can't even
provide 10 streams per day to the artists listed on top, it is
certainly a bad one.
The greater impact of illegitimate playlisting
As mentioned before, fake playlists are
detrimental to the artist and the general music industry because
they render Spotify’s valuable analytics null and void. For
instance, you won’t really know the top cities of your fan base because
this info is tarnished by the fake listeners from
fake accounts. And if you’re paying to gain placements on those
playlists, then you are not able to exploit the statistic
features
that Spotify provides. You won’t be able to make the best
decisions for your career, such as where you should hold
concerts or gigs. Promoters and brands who want to collaborate
with you based on your Spotify numbers will be disappointed too
because they will discover that you don’t have the impact
assumed from your numbers. You will most probably lose valuable
partners because you cannot deliver what your numbers promise.
So what can you do after all?
Pretty simple, use legitimate ways. Follow the
rules,
don't cheat. You want to get on Spotify playlists in order to
increase your streams?
Great! Do it the proper way. Run ads pointing to your profile.
Find and contact playlist curators yourself. Use legitimate
services like playlisterz.com. On playlisterz.com we check manually
and verify which of the playlists submitted to be 100% real.
Only 100% real playlists
can participate in our program, the rest are declined. We use all
sorts of practices in order to determine if a playlist is
organically grown, and if has active listeners, or if was
manipulated in any way. So you can rest assured that your
song will be sent to the right playlist curators.
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