We Cracked The Spotify Algorithm... Again

great work thank you

So, what is the main point? What should we do to increase our number of streams?

Andrew brother, first of all thank you so much for the information and the studies and selflessly sharing your wisdom man. My song "Halfway Okay" got into Discover weekly with 1600 streams with 16% PI

Dude, sub'ed. This is the intersection of music and engineering that I've been waiting for

🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️🙏🙏🙏

Also have a few friends that have been triggering release radar with like less than 100 monthly’s and snowballing to 3-5k in a few days

I’m a lil confused, my first song just came out last week, I have about 230 streams but I’ve already triggered release radar and radio

Thanks for the insight! Regarding these thresholds you mentioned: Does this report make any differentiation between lean forward & passive streams?

Is this popularity per genre? If it's not, then a niche genre might be always at 1% of the total popularity...

how long to get the "13,000" streams time range wise after release? (for release radar push) or is there no time scale for that? I assume there is based on not getting that yet, hmmm

Hey Andrew, thought maybe you can help me solve a puzzle I am having right now. I released two songs on the same label in the span of two weeks, let's call them song A and song B. Both songs got included on similar playlists that are handled by the label (I'd say 80-90% playlists are same). Song A did about 15k streams in ~7 days before starting to get algorithmic radio plays and now it's the dominant source of streams. On the other hand, song B has been out for 10 days and is now sitting on 22k streams at 35% pop. score and it still hasn't properly triggered radio algorithm. I compared playlist adds and saves and these are very similar to song A in the first 7 days of it being released. Why do you think song B still hasn't triggered radio algorithm?

Why are my Google Ads running for many months getting zero impressions in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom?

The analytics still seem so weird to me, my track had a popularity score of 31 for over 3 weeks when it finally starting being shown on Discover Weekly. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason why. I put in the request so you or your team could check it out, but there wasn't anywhere in the form to put my email so you could possible update me directly with the info you find out? I think by the time you release the video the stats may be a little behind, seems to be about 20-30% more streams now to hit the same algorithmic boosts as discussed in this video.

Thanks Andrew. Your counseling has been invaluable in helping me achieve my growth from 20 thousand to over 70 thousand monthly listeners. Never would have got there without your advice !! 🙂

This is probably a dumb question: Does this show that Popularity Index is a leading indicator and not a lagging indicator?

In other words: Is it more accurate to say that the reason a song gets a lot of streams / algorithmic boost is because it has a certain popularity index? – or that the reason it has a certain popularity index is because it got a certain amount of streams? Or maybe more simply: How sure are we that PI is the most important predictive variable?

That last graph around 11:12 makes it look pretty good in terms of predicting Radio streams, but I wonder if you just swapped out PI with 28-day streams how close things would line up.

Anyway, this video (and the report) is absolutely dope. Amazing work.

I can give you access to a few big, big artists as reader, but I need you to promise not to report me, cause I shouldn't

Spotify is dead. Cracking yourself into zero dollars. I love you Andrew but we need block chain for music.

How you do crack the algorithm doing meta ads when the new iOS blocks ads and tracking?

So, I have over 220k monthly listeners, based on music stax, my top 4 songs all have a popularity score of 40%. My #1 is 47% and my number 4 is 41%.

yo andrew! I’ve been sitting at 20K- 40K monthly listeners for 5 years and can’t seem to get out of it, any tips besides meta push? would love to hop on a call

Great stuff as always. The last study was super insightful, this one shows a clear upward shift in requirements to get more algorithmic support. Thank you Andrew and team!

Well done

All my music has been removed from Spotify. I will never pay to play some war criminal ever again. Bandcamp and record stores only. Spodify is run by fascists. I will never support a ompany that I know is connected to the war machine.

I’ve faced similar struggles with Spotify too, it’s really not friendly at all for new or rising artists. Now I do everything myself, videos, artwork and promotion, and luckily my experience with marketing and Meta ads helps me push songs into YouTube’s algorithm at the lowest cost per stream. With just $300 on a recent release, it already passed half a million streams and is performing way better on YouTube and YouTube Music while on Spotify it sits at 40K streams. Honestly, YouTube feels like the best platform right now for upcoming artists.

thank you for the data! it's awesome! best regards from Chile!

Hey Andrew, after 3 months from the release of my last single, suddenly Spotify Radio Algorithm started pushing my song up 7k streams per day, but it stopped after one week. Why this happen? How does it work? Why it stopped? Looking forward to hearing from you, thanks. Emilio.

This is not really helpful to me. But it would be helpful for people that have popular songs. I've been on Spotify for four years I can't get any of our songs to be popular on Spotify I've pitched over 140 songs. Not once have Spotify selected any one of them for editorial playlist or discover weekly etc... because we don't have enough listeners. We can't get enough listeners. How can you get listeners? this is a catch 22 you have to have listeners to make any of this algorithm stuff work. We don't have listeners and so it doesn't work. Sad. The Spotify system is 100% rigged.

Hi Andrew,

Two months ago, while running Meta engagement campaigns in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, we were getting very low CPC rates (around $0.002–$0.003). However, now, two months later, the CPC has increased significantly to $0.01–$0.02—even though targeting and ad creatives remain the same.

Additionally, Meta Ads Manager shows that my reels are getting around 100 engagements, but when I check the actual IG reels, I only see about 18 likes, no saves, no shares, no comments, and just a few hundred to a thousand views. This discrepancy wasn’t happening before.

Interestingly, the current campaign model is still performing well for image posts, but not for reels. The only change I made between then and now is the payment method.

Could you help me understand why this might be happening and how to resolve it?

So knowing this, is it worth it to invest on meta ads from a release of mine from 4 months ago?

took me $800 AUD to reach discover weekly on my last track. With this, has done barely any plays since (400 or so). meta is fkd these days. I actually don't know how we can grow as artist without spending huge amounts of money for validation.

My costs have blown up again, min $.50c (AUD, $0.30c USD) on the last campaign. On my latest campaign, first few days I've pushed $50+/day and the campaigns are starting off at $1.30+ CPA. Meta sucks. This is the largest (budget and creative) campaign I've ran. POOR results so far....

Andrew have you watched the Wall Street Journal interview videos on YouTube where they interview the Spotify developers and they go into great depth on how the AI recommendation engine works? I saw them yesterday and it was fantastic.

Hey Andrew, love your channel, please keep doing the great work! I just hit a PI of 33 on one my songs but still no algo strams, does it take a while, or because most of the streams were from seo playlists, I should'nt be expecting any algo push?

❤️ Thanks for you and your team being so diligent about this.

Thank you buddy for how you help us indie artist… but I still need guide on the Facebook id code to run ads for personal accounts