How to get more listeners on Spotify (and everywhere else)

New listeners rarely arrive through one lucky break. They come through a handful of routes that Spotify and the other services use to put new music in front of people: the editors who read pitches before release, the personal playlists that fill up on release day, and the algorithms that pick up songs people play and save in the weeks after. Each route opens at a different moment. A release planned around those moments gives the song its best start on every one of them.

This guide explains each route in general terms, how they connect, and how the same thinking carries over to Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud and radio. Every section links to a guide that goes deeper on its part.

How listeners find a new song

Few people search for an artist they've never heard of. They hear a song because something put it in front of them: a playlist, a recommendation, a short video, a friend, a station in a café. On Spotify, most of that something is a playlist, and playlists come in three kinds.

• Editorial playlists are built by Spotify's editors, by genre, mood, scene and moment. Spotify describes its editors as pairing data with knowledge of local culture. The way in is a pitch, covered in the Spotify editorial pitch.
• Personal playlists such as Release Radar, Discover Weekly, the Daily Mixes and song radio are built for each listener by Spotify's algorithms, from that listener's taste.
• Listener-made playlists come from fans, curators, blogs and other artists. A song saved into many of them gives the algorithms more to read about who likes it.

These routes feed each other. Someone who finds your song on an editorial playlist and saves it tells the algorithm something about the song. The algorithm then tries it on people with similar taste, some of whom add it to their own playlists, and the circle widens. Getting more listeners is mostly a matter of giving each route what it needs at the moment it's reading. How the Spotify algorithm works for artists goes into the signals in detail.

Off Spotify the routes look different but follow the same pattern: short videos that carry a song to people scrolling, YouTube's own recommendations, radio stations and the song recognition apps that name what's playing.

The three moments that matter

Every release has three windows where these routes open: the weeks before release day, the day itself, and the weeks after. What you do in one sets up the next.

Before release day

This is when the editors listen. Spotify's pitching tool in Spotify for Artists only takes unreleased songs, one at a time, and Spotify asks you to deliver your music at least 7 days before release for it to reach Release Radar in its first week. That's the minimum. Editors plan their playlists ahead, so a release date set weeks out gives them more room, and gives you time to fix anything a store sends back without moving the date. How far ahead to deliver is its own question, answered in how early to send your music.

It's also when fans hear the song is coming. A pre-save lets a listener add the song before it's out, so it's in their library when it goes live. Spotify pre-saves explains what a pre-save link does and how it works across the stores.

And it's when the song gets its look: the cover, the bio and the Canvas, the short looping video that plays behind a song in Spotify's Now Playing view. Spotify's Canvas guidelines ask for a vertical 9:16 loop, 3–8 seconds long, between 720 and 1080 px tall, as an MP4 or JPG. The Canvas checker tests a file against those specs.

Release day

Release Radar is where release day starts for most artists. If you pitch a song at least 7 days before release, Spotify adds it to your followers' Release Radar playlists. Spotify also recommends new releases in Release Radar to listeners whose taste is close to the music, so it can reach people who don't follow you yet. How Release Radar fills walks through it.

The other half of release day is the people who already know you. Their plays and saves in the first days are the first signals the algorithms read about a new song, so this is when your posts tell them it's out and where to find it. Releases typically go live at midnight in each listener's time zone, so the day starts for your audience at different hours around the world.

The weeks after

After release day, the algorithms take over most of the reading. Spotify says its recommendations rely on each listener's taste profile, shaped by searching, listening, skipping and saving, and on trends across many listeners. A song that people play through, save and add to their own playlists gets tried on more listeners: in Discover Weekly, in song and artist radio, in autoplay after an album ends. How Discover Weekly picks songs covers the weekly playlist most artists ask about.

This is also the window most releases go quiet in. The song is new for a few weeks, and posts that keep it in front of people during those weeks give the algorithms more listening to read. What to post once the song is out is covered in how to promote a song after release.

What Spotify's algorithms read

Spotify publishes the main inputs behind its recommendations on its Understanding recommendations page. In plain terms:

• What each listener does: what they search for, play, skip and save to their library.
• What listeners tell Spotify: who they follow, their language, their location if they share it.
• Trends: when many people do the same thing with a song, the algorithms learn how others might respond to it.
• The song itself: its genre, its release date and other facts about the music.

For an artist, the useful part is the first and third lines. A song gets carried further when the people who hear it choose it again: they let it play, save it, add it to a playlist, follow you. A small audience that does that tells the algorithms more than a big one that skips. That's why the listeners who already like your music matter so much in the first days, and why reaching the right people beats reaching many.

It's also why streams have to come from people. Spotify's rules treat paid services that guarantee streams or playlist spots as a breach of its terms: artificial streams are removed from public numbers, their royalties can be withheld, and the music can be taken off Spotify. Listening from real fans is what every route above reads.

Why followers matter more than one big week

Monthly listeners rise and fall with each release. Followers stay. Every follower gets your next release in their Release Radar when you pitch it in time, so each one makes the next release start further ahead. An artist who releases regularly and turns some listeners into followers each time builds an audience that hears every new song on its first day.

Two guides go into this: how to get more monthly listeners on Spotify explains what moves that number, and how to turn listeners into followers covers the profile, the links and the asks that help. If you're starting from zero, your first 1,000 streams is about what a first release needs to get going.

Beyond Spotify: Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud and radio

Spotify gets most of the questions, but the same three moments hold on the other services, and a release goes to all of them at once.

• Apple Music has its own editors, its own personal mixes and Apple Music for Artists to show how a release is doing. Apple Music promotion covers what's different there.
• YouTube and YouTube Music carry your release too, and short videos can take a song to people who've never searched for you. YouTube Music promotion explains how the two connect.
• SoundCloud and Audiomack run more on community: reposts, comments and follows from other artists and fans. More listeners on SoundCloud and Audiomack covers both.
• Radio, cars and song recognition name what's playing from music databases such as Gracenote, and apps such as Shazam match a song to its title and artist. A song that's in those databases shows up with your name wherever it's played. How to get your music on the radio explains how stations find and play independent music.

Where Audora does this for every release

Everything above is a set of steps around a release date. On Audora, every track gets those steps, done or dated in your account from the moment you set the date:

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• Every release goes out with a pitch for the people who market it to the stores, written from your answers about the song.
• Audora dates your release to give the editors time to hear it.
• Your own moves (your pitch in Spotify for Artists, the pre-save, the Canvas) come up on the release's calendar on the day they matter.
• Cover art, a bio in three lengths and a Canvas, made to the stores' spec, all yours with full commercial rights.
• Your music goes into the databases radio, cars and song recognition read, Gracenote and Shazam among them, alongside Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, YouTube and 140+ stores.
• A promotion campaign planned around the release, before the day and after it: every post written in your voice with its caption, hashtags and the picture or video it needs. You approve what goes out.
• Every playlist your song is on, shown back to you (editorial, algorithmic and listener-made), with plays and saves from the stores' own reporting.

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram (Stories included) and Facebook Pages post automatically, and nothing goes out until you approve it. Stories carry no link sticker, so your release link goes in your bio.

This guide explains the routes. The exact steps for your release, each on its own date, are inside your Audora account, and we keep adjusting them as we see what works for the artists releasing with us: a step added here, one retimed there. Each release you set up gets the latest version. See what every track gets for the whole release, phase by phase.

Every guide on getting more listeners

Each of these takes one route or one service further:

• More Spotify monthly listeners: what moves the number, and why it rises and falls.
• Your first 1,000 streams: what a first release needs to find its first listeners.
• The Spotify editorial pitch: what editors look for and why timing matters.
• Release Radar: how the playlist fills and who it reaches.
• Discover Weekly: how listening feeds the weekly playlist.
• The Spotify algorithm for artists: the signals behind every personal playlist.
• Apple Music promotion: editors, personal mixes and Apple Music for Artists.
• YouTube Music promotion: your release on YouTube and the short videos that carry it.
• SoundCloud and Audiomack: listeners on the community-run services.
• Listeners into followers: why followers add up from one release to the next.
• Get your music on the radio: how stations find songs and how they name them.

For the release itself, start with how to release music. For the posts around it, how to promote your music.