For any independent hip hop artist, one of the most challenging aspects of your use of streaming media is being spotted.

While you can easily enough get yourself on Spotify with the use of tools like CDBaby, there is a limit to what this achieves. After all, the old adage of ‘if a tree falls in the woods…’ comes to mind here.

If your music is on Spotify but nobody can find it, does anybody hear it?

For that reason, being ready and willing to investigate and invest in the advertising and marketing side matters a great deal. Like just about any other part of media and advertising, using Spotify – and other streaming tools – is all about networking.

The key to success on a platform like Spotify is about collaborating and talking with people who curate and run popular playlists. Or, alternatively, creating your own playlist and showing off your musical qualities directly that way.

Either way, showing the importance of advertising and marketing when using Spotify should be a priority. Advertising takes a lot of work, and one of the most important things that you can do is to look into making the right impression.

In a normal line of work outside of independent music, you would be far more cautious. If someone said they could get you a job, you don’t badger and pester them about it. If you think someone can help you get more visibility on Spotify, don’t blow your chance!

Advertising with Spotify: Creating a Profile

So, the first thing that you need is a viable interesting and worthwhile Spotify profile. You can have an encyclopedic Wikipedia profile and a great website, but this is Spotify. If someone finds your profile on Spotify and it’s barren of all useful information, they’ll not likely search more about you on other mediums. So, it’s important that you can make a good and inclusive Spotify profile for both catching curators, networking improvement and for impressing newcomers to your music, right?

The first thing that you need to do is go to Spotify for Artists. This is the perfect starting point for anyone who is looking to take that next step forward. This allows you to make sure that you can get your artist profile up and running, ensuring that you can also verify yourself to help add authenticity to the profile.

You can then have total control of your Spotify visibility and your general profile; it also helps you to add featured tracks and playlists from your music genre that you are into.

We recommend filling in these sections with some music from fellow hip hop artists who you like and want to try and collaborate with at one point; it’s a good way to show you are diverse and know the scene, if nothing else

You need to start developing a profile; it will be much easier to empower your networking and marketing on Spotify if you do this from an early start.

Advertising with Spotify: Discover Weekly

The next thing we need to aim for is to get you on the prestigious Discover Weekly platform. With the help of the Spotify Release Radar system, we can get you noticed if you are willing to work to make that possible.

A productive week could see you featured on the Release Radar; a two-hour long playlist curated every Friday. If you have been making waves at that point in time, you could show up here.

As more people find you through the Release Radar, you can begin to see huge increases in follower count and similar. If you are serious about using Spotify for this kind of purpose, then you need to start working with social media to try bring about more awareness to your profile. More on that in a moment.

Before that, we need to look at Discover Weekly. If you can get onto Discover Weekly – a massively powerful feature for the biggest and best upcoming names in the music industry on Spotify.

Get on this and you can see wind up on other people’ playlists by nature, as well as users sharing your content with their own friends and family. This makes you more likely to fall into the hip hop category and show up in other searches and Related Artists searches, thus further improving visibility.

With enough growth on social media, you can make a huge impression for all the right reasons. It takes a lot of work, of course, but you will find that it’s well worth the effort.

Interacting with people on social media to look at your Spotify profile can help to boost your follower count, leading to being on the Release Radar and, in time, Discover Weekly.

We don’t need to say how powerful that is!

Advertising with Spotify: Using Facebook for Marketing

One thing that you absolutely need to do, then, is to start using Spotify and Facebook in tandem with one another. Many curators and people who make playlists usually link their Facebook profile to Spotify, meaning that you can easily get in touch with them and plug your tunes.

Start off by going to Spotify and looking for ‘New Releases’ in playlists, and then look for hip-hop specific content. Make sure that it’s the kind of hip hop that you are producing, though; ensure that you fit in with their general taste and the sound they are creating.

Then, contact them on Facebook with links to your Spotify account. By pitching yourself to them – simply ask them to check out your profile and offer feedback if they have time, let them decide to feature you – you make it more likely they’ll share your details with their followers who are already proven to like your kind of music.

As you can imagine, this can provide a massive boost to your ability to market your Spotify profile to help bring in more listen, followers, shares and playlist appearances. It’s a long-term process, but the above should really help you to make the right impression.