Spotify lets artists promote music through personal recommendation algorithm

Spotify comes with a new service where artists can mark certain music as a priority, after which this is taken as a signal by the algorithm that determines personal listening sessions.

According to Spotify, the introduction of this service means that the artist should have more control over how certain music is found and discovered on the streaming platform. It makes it possible for the algorithms to also take into account what is important to the artists, for example songs they are very enthusiastic about or a production that has gone viral.

Spotify emphasizes that the tool is accessible to artists at any stage of their career and that it doesn’t require any budget to make use of it. In exchange for the extra promotion, artists, labels or rights holders will be faced with a special royalty rate. That rate is lower than normal, although Spotify does not say how much lower. The idea is that the promotion can make songs more popular and play more often outside of the Spotify sections where the promotions and lower rates apply. Artists can turn off the promotions if it does not yield enough returns.

For now, the tool is only being tested in certain parts of Spotify, namely Radio and Autoplay. According to the company behind the streaming service, these are places where listeners specifically search for new music. For the time being, the promotion numbers will not appear in other playlists, although that may change in the future.

The streaming service emphasizes that listeners’ satisfaction is the top priority. Based on this view, no guarantees are given to artists that the songs will actually be placed. Spotify says that even after the tool’s introduction and the way its algorithms interact with it, the platform will only recommend music that users really think they want to hear.