**Guest post by One Submit, the ultimate music submission platform.

"Your song is now uploaded to digital distribution platforms and it’s officially online with millions of streaming stores. Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, etc. However, just because it's online doesn't necessarily mean your song will be streamed.

If your Spotify or Apple Music account has no followers, placing a song on your profile is equivalent to a live show without an audience. Once your song is on all streaming platforms, the hard work begins: Promoting and Sourcing Your Music. The main way to promote and listen to your music on streaming platforms is to submit your music to playlists. There are other ways to promote your music, such as sharing the song on social media or your artist's website, but most of the time it doesn't make much of a difference unless it goes hand in hand with promoting the music to streaming platforms.

+Musician's Guide to Marketing Plans

Sending to a playlist is the most efficient and effective way to get your music heard, undoubtedly. But how do you place your track on a playlist? Should you focus your efforts on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or Tidal? Which one is better?

If you want to know more, you've come to the right place.

Who, what and how?

Four streaming platforms currently dominate the music streaming market.

Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal.

Spotify

Spotify launched in Sweden about 14 years ago, gradually expanded to Scandinavian regions such as Finland and Norway in 2009, and two years later to France, Denmark, the UK and Spain. Spotify is now the world's largest streaming platform with over 400 million subscribers and is available in over 180 countries. 57% of Spotify users are free users and 43% of them are paying users.

With Spotify’s premium subscription service, you can freely browse songs without listening to audio ads, listening offline, or using additional features.

Spotify recently expanded into the video streaming space, but that's a separate blog post. The platform playlists are made out of user-created playlists, algorithmic playlists, editorial playlists, radio stations and podcasts. Spotify also has a dashboard option for artists, it’s a nice place for artists to understand their songs statistics, playlist placements and more. If you are an artist, please check it out at: https://artists.Spotify.com

+WANT YOUR MUSIC ON SPOTIFY? 5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL DISTRIBUTORS

Apple Music

Spotify and Apple Music currently dominate the streaming market. Launched in 2015, Apple Music is now his second most popular music streaming service in the world with 88 million users. Apple Music is now available in 167 countries and is more popular in the US, while Spotify is more popular in Europe.

Apple's music service is very similar to Spotify's catalog of songs and their subscription prices are basically the same worldwide. Similar to Spotify, the platform has curated and algorithmic playlists, radio stations and podcasts, but there are significant differences when it comes to user-created playlists. Sending music to Apple Music is also a bit tricky, but we'll get to that in a moment. There are also Apple Music options for artists. It's like Spotify, but less advanced. However, you can create your own artist account to increase your followers on Apple Music, check it out at: https://artists.apple.com/

Deezer

Deezer is a French streaming service founded in 2007. This music streaming platform has grown exponentially, reaching more than 180 countries around the world and increasing its monthly active user base to 16 million users. Deezer content includes a shuffle feature that lets you mix your favorite tracks with Deezer featured artists. This is similar to Daily Mix playlist by Spotify.

The platform offers a wide range of entertainment, sports and news podcasts and has over 32,000 international and local radio stations. Deezer is also the first music streaming platform that allows radio partners like TalkSport to bring live sports commentary to their users. This platform is very popular in France where it all started. You have the option to submit your music to the Deezer editorial team. I'm not sure if anyone is listening on the other side, but it's worth a try.

Tidal

Tidal is our favorite platform because of the sound quality played on the platform.

Tidal, formerly known as Aspiro, was first launched by Jörgen Adolfsson, Christer Månsson and Klas Hallqvist in the mid-90s and was acquired by Jay Z's company in 2015. Unlike other platforms, Tidal offers high quality streaming audio files, meaning WAV files with 44khz-48khz quality, compared to quality mp3 files on the other platforms.

Tidal's catalog includes his 80 million songs and over 350,000 music videos. Currently streamed in 61 countries. Pricing is about the same as Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, and the company claims it has more than 3 million users.

+Get your MUSIC on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, & More

Playlists for different platforms

Once you've uploaded your songs to a streaming platform, you can start sending your playlists for viewing on various platforms.

Each platform has different types of playlists and different ways to submit music to playlists.

Spotify playlists

Spotify playlists are the most popular, and are split into 3 different kinds of playlists:

Editorial playlists

Editorial playlists are created by Spotify playlist curators, which are members of Spotify's editorial team. Spotify is always promoting their own playlists on their platform and that's why the editorial playlists are the biggest ones. Getting your music on editorial playlists is a game changer for artists and can drive many streams and followers to the artist who manages to get their song on these editorial playlists. It is not an easy task but it’s doable. We will explain in a few moments.

Algorithmic playlists

Every time you listen to your favorite song on repeat, follow an artist, or save a song, Spotify's algorithm remembers it. Spotify then analyzes the data, and creates customized playlists specifically towards your musical taste. These playlists are a huge opportunity for artists to promote their songs and connect with their true followers.

There are three main types of algorithm playlists.

Daily Mix, Discover Weekly and Release Radar. There’s a few more but we will focus now on these three. Daily mixes are constantly updated and can include mixed types of music genres. The more you play “Daily Mix”, the more often you will hear new songs on it.

Release Radar is a weekly updated 2 hour playlist. Songs on these playlists are new singles from artists you follow.

Discover Weekly features artists who match your musical tastes and people who share your musical interests. Updated every Monday, it's a great opportunity to introduce yourself as an artist. To get your song on this playlist, you need to get a lot of streams in a short time. This can be achieved by adding songs to the following types of playlists described below.

User-created playlists

Playlists created by Spotify users. In other words, playlists are curated by different people with different musical tastes. Anyone can create their own playlists, and all users can choose to keep curated playlists private or public. Most of our users are regular users who create their own playlists for fun and sort songs by musical genres and themes. Some people create playlists for a professional purpose such as restaurants, bars, music charts, exercise, sports, and playlists from different brands.

We provide a way to submit music for these playlists to our submission platform.

The main goal of every artist is to trigger algorithmic playlists and attract the attention of editorial playlists, this will hopefully put your song on the editorial playlists. To trigger Spotify’s algorithmic AI, artists need to get many plays, likes and playlist placement in a short time; this can be done through user created playlists.

Our One Submit platform also provides a way to submit music to radio stations, music blogs, record labels, YouTube channels and upcoming Deezer and Apple music playlists. Our submission process is easy to use.

+How To Submit Your Music to Spotify Editorial Playlists

Apple Music playlists

Sending to Apple Music playlists is difficult and less accessible than Spotify.

Like Spotify, Apple Music has its own curated playlists managed by Apple's editorial team. Apple's editorial team cannot rate your music at this time. It is impossible to put your music in front of an editorial team or have a relationship with Apple's editorial team.

A big difference between playlists on each platform is the visibility of the follower count for each playlist. Spotify lets you see exactly how many followers each playlist has. We may also track the number of followers who are on the platform through third party platforms such as Chartmetric. Apple Music is different because follower counts for each playlist are not disclosed and Apple keeps the information private.

Yes, you can find user-created playlists and send music to Apple Music, but if you’re looking to get song exposure, you should ask yourself, whether a specific playlists has a lot of traffic and listeners or it was just created and has few followers? That’s a crucial missing information.

Deezer playlists

Deezer playlists work similarly to Spotify playlists. There are editorial playlists and user-created playlists with a viewable number of followers, unlike Apple Music playlists.

It has significantly fewer playlists than Spotify and significantly less users, leading to less playlists created by users.

Artists looking to submit music to Deezer playlists can do their own research and find playlists in similar genres, match the playlist’s music genre to your music, find the playlist curator, and submit your music to him.

It's a long process with a low success rate, but it's always worth a try if you have time to do some research.

+How To Get On Playlists: The Top Three Methods

Tidal playlists

Tidal playlists are primarily managed by Tidal. User-created playlists are not very popular, and each of these playlists has a very small number of followers.

Tidal currently has a low subscriber count compared to other platforms, so we recommend that you don't waste your precious time researching and submitting playlists to Tidal.

Spotify is undoubtedly the most popular streaming platform, but the other platforms (Deezer and Apple Music) are also worth researching and submitting music to their playlists. If you’re thinking out of the box, and willing to put some effort to it, you might get some unique exposure.

Good luck! "

Related Blog Posts:

+Playlisting and How Indie Artists Should be Using it

+How To Spot A Fake Spotify Playlist

+How to Find Playlists on Spotify that Accept New Music Submissions