Table of Contents
- What is a Music Streaming Service?
- 3 Steps to Making a Successful Song on a Streaming Platform
- Interview with DJ Grumble
- Conclusion
What is a Music Streaming Service?
A music streaming service is a type of company that specializes in making music or audio more accessible. Instead of using CDs, Vinyl, or Cassette tapes, streaming services use audio files to play music for their audience. This music is usually free to play or requires a subscription. The user using the platform gets an endless amount of music tracks to choose from.
One well-known streaming service is Spotify, which has over 500 million users. That’s more than the population of Mexico and the United States combined! Other streaming services include Amazon Music, Deezer, and Apple Music.
Even though vinyl has made a comeback in recent years, streaming services remain one of the most popular ways for an artist to publish their music. Not only do they reach a larger audience, but they can make more money for artists than they would from releasing analog music. Plus, when you get monthly listeners, and as a result, streams, raising your popularity as an artist. This increases the chance for fans to support your music, by donating, buying merch, or purchasing physical forms of your music.
But with the popularity of streaming services, it can be hard to get your music out to a larger audience. While some Spotify artists get millions of monthly listeners, some struggle to get a few. In this article, we will dive deep into what makes a song on a streaming service successful. This includes insider information from artist and producer, DJ Grumble.
1. Break the Algorithm
If your goal is to become extremely popular on a streaming platform, learning how the algorithm works will help you become a successful artist. One song that did this was Aaj Shanibar by Rupa.
When it was first uploaded to YouTube, it gained a spike of interest between the years 2017 to 2018. Even though it was uploaded in 2016, it seems that the YouTube algorithm was updated between 2017 and 2018, making it extremely popular for an obscure and international song. Yet, it contains elements of various music genres, making it as successful as it is today. Because of its upbeatness and catchiness, it quickly became a popular song on YouTube.
It should be taken into account that many other factors made this song as successful as it was. However, the unique structure of this song ultimately led to its success on YouTube and several streaming services.
2. Get Your Song On Playlists
Playlists are one of the biggest factors in popularizing music on streaming services. If one of your songs is featured in a well-known or trending playlist, you can gain thousands of followers within days. The more playlists your work is featured on, the more popular your music becomes.
One artist who became extremely successful from this is DJ Grumble. The more playlists he got onto, the more successful of an artist he became. Popular playlists also make an artist popular and successful for this same reason.
Another artist, Esbe, had his song, Darling featured in many playlists. One of those playlists became extremely popular on Spotify, making Darling his most popular and most-played song of all time (With over 22 million plays as of 2023. Esbe had around 15-17 million for Darling in 2022).
3. Collaborations
Another factor that makes songs on Spotify popular, is collaborations. This is especially the case for the experimental band, The Avalanches.
After The Avalanches released their album, We Will Always Love You, they gained tons of monthly listeners on Spotify. This is because they collaborated on songs with other famous artists. One of them includes MGMT, with over 12 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
The Avalanches also gained even more song plays and popularity, after they released their 20th Anniversary Edition of their well-known album, Since I Left You. Because this album featured so many different remixes of songs in the Since I Left You album, this boosted the popularity of The Avalanches tremendously.
Interview with DJ Grumble
DJ Grumble is a producer and artist originally from Boston, Massachusetts. Over the years, his music has become successful on SoundCloud and continued to grow on the streaming platform, Spotify. After contacting DJ Grumble, he gave me a lot of information about how his music became successful on Spotify.
One thing he told me, is that the main factor driving his rise in monthly listeners is Spotify’s algorithmic playlist. Around 65% of his streams come from these playlists, primarily Radio. He has become a popular artist on Spotify because of his popularity on SoundCloud. Even though he started to upload to Spotify in 2015, he gained 100,000 monthly listeners in the years 2018 to 2019. He was not paying for any kind of advertising and became popular from his successful music tracks featured in over 500,000 user-generated playlists. Because of this, Spotify started recognizing his tracks better in the algorithm, recommending them to more users (and giving him likes, shares, and additions to playlists as a result).
DJ Grumble says that he has begun to notice that whenever someone engages with his music on the Spotify platform (by liking it, sharing it, or adding it to a playlist), it ranks higher in the Spotify algorithm. Thus, more people see his music as a Spotify recommendation.
DJ Grumble also realized what kind of tracks he made were successful. After gaining a large following on SoundCloud, he realized what music tracks people enjoyed and listened to. This allowed him to create his unique brand of music, unlike others on streaming platforms at the time. He also collaborated with well-known artists from major record labels, which drove more traffic to his music.
DJ Grumble also works with content creators (on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), which seems to drive his traffic further.
If you are interested in more information about DJ Grumble, you can contact him or read the email about his success on Spotify below. He allows you to use his music if you credit him with a link to his Spotify and SoundCloud profile (in social media, video games, etc.).
Contact DJ Grumble
To contact DJ Grumble, go to his Bandcamp page and look for the link that reads, “Contact DJ Grumble”
Full Email
Below is the full email from DJ Grumble that describes how he became a successful artist through Spotify’s algorithm and various other streaming services. He also talks about other factors that helped him gain a lot of popularity.
The main factor driving my current rise in monthly listeners is Spotify’s algorithmic playlists. About 65% of my total streams currently come from Spotify Algorithmic playlists, primarily Radio. I had been achieving good organic growth on Spotify for quite some time — after a couple years of uploading to Spotify (I started in 2015), I had reached 100k monthly listeners by 2018-2019 with basically zero paid promotion or advertising, and had also gotten several Spotify editorial playlist placements. My tracks have also been added to over 500,000 individual user playlists. Eventually, a bunch of my tracks started to score very highly in Spotify’s algorithmic ranking system, which basically measures user engagement on your music (likes, playlist adds, shares). The higher the score, the more likely Spotify will recommend a track to other users. So it’s created a sort of positive feedback loop where Spotify recommends my music to someone, and then they engage with it (Like, Share, add to playlists), so it ranks higher in Spotify’s algorithm, and subsequently gets recommended to more people, and so on.
There are also a lot of non-Spotify factors at play here too, of course. Even before I started putting my music out on Spotify, I had gained a significant following on other platforms such as SoundCloud, so I already knew that I had a good “product” and in general what types of tracks people enjoyed hearing. Since starting out with Spotify I’ve also worked with recording artists who were signed to major record labels, and subsequently released very popular tracks using my beats, so those production credits help drive additional traffic to my Spotify. I also work with a lot of social media influencers and content creators who use my beats in the background of their videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc, and that sends more traffic my way. If there’s anything you’d like to know more about, or need me to explain more in depth, just ask!
DJ Grumble
Conclusion
What I have come to gather from my research is that the key is to make unique and interesting music and use a lot of different platforms to boost your music’s popularity. You can also collaborate with other artists and content creators, to boost it even further. All of this together, makes you a more popular artist, giving you an advantage to becoming more successful.
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