What Is the Spotify Popularity Score?
You have 2 levels.
- Artist score
An amalgamation of your scores and traction as an artist.
- Track score
Each track has its own score.
Spotify’s popularity score is a reflection of how the artist and their tracks are performing on the platform. It isn’t real-time, it’s on up to a 3 day lag. It tracks a few metrics to reach the score (and probably more than Spotify officially say). The score influences everything from search results to whether your track ends up in algorithmic playlists.
What Affects It?
Spotify officially state:
- Number of plays
- How recent the plays were
And reverse engineering also shows that it tracks:
- Save rate
- Skip rate
- Repeat rate
- Plays in week 1 of release highly regarded
- Playlist traction, specifically users own created playlists
- Off platform hype, links elsewhere taking fans to Spotify
What Spotify Say
| Total number of plays | Raw stream count. Catalogue with millions of historic plays keep mid-level scores even if their current plays dip. |
| How recent the plays were | Spotify applies a time-decay curve that rewards fresh listening activity; a burst of new streams can lift a track above an older hit with bigger lifetime numbers. |
| Not real time | Expect score movements to appear 24-72h after campaign spikes. |
| Artist & album popularity derived from track popularity | Raise multiple track scores and the aggregated artist score follows. |
| Track versions matter | The album version and the single version of the same song each receive their own score. Edits or remasters don’t inherit the parent track’s popularity. |
Raising the Score
| High streams in first week | New releases may be tested early, momentum boosts the score and pushes out algorithmically, can lead to long tail growth |
| Save rate | Strong signals, positive interaction with artists, stats suggest above 30% of listeners saving boost score |
| Low skip rate / full listens / repeat listens | Listening to most or all of the track, or repeating, signal users like it, signals track is worth pushing further out |
| Playlist traction | Popular playlists increase the score, user playlists signal strong associations to the song |
| Consistent release schedule | Keeps popularity score higher over time, new data going to the algorithm constantly, signals there is content to keep users interested |
| Off platform buzz | Tracking of links taking people into Spotify and searches for you, shows you are promoting the material and driving traffic to their site |
What Can You Do?
It always starts with the music.
The Music
It has to be good. Or more accurately, what people who love music in your genre perceive as good. The only rule is that you have to give your existing and potential fans something they’ll love.
You’re looking to be featured where they browse for new music, so it needs to grab and keep their attention. There are a few pointers on this:
- When producing do direct comparisons to tracks you want your quality to match
- Music needs to stand out when it follows them in a playlist
- But stand out for the right reasons 🙂
- Don’t have an overly long intro, people may (and often) skip
- Unless it’s right for your genre
- And then it still needs interest to keep people listening
- Consider the hook being in the first 15-20 seconds, or a reference to the hook
Release Strategy
- Create a full release timeline
- Pre and post release so you know what your strategy is and you can stick to it to maximise the score
- Have the next releases planed
- If you’re making an EP, use the waterfall strategy
- Have your next releases ready to go
- Look at releasing every 6 weeks, maximum 8 weeks between releases
- This keeps your overall score as an artist high and shows Spotify that you’re consistent and worth pushing algorithmically
- Plan your promo activity around the release
- Create a written plan with actions
- Pitch in your Spotify for Artists at least 7 days before release
- Have a canvas to upload to each DSP that accepts it
- Get your bank of story assets ready to go
- Insta, TikTok, whatever the platform
- Promo for the song to drive traffic
- If you have a video make sure to upload it
- Songs with videos are getting more traction at the moment
Interest Before Release
We want to build interest so that on or just after release day we’ve got plenty of fans listening to the track. This gives us a head start at boosting the first week of release:
- Pre save campaign
- Collect and use emails from fans to notify the release
- Use a pre save link (preferable a forever save)
- Mobilise fans via a WhatsApp group, Discord or similar
- Develop a network of artists and friends to support each others releases
- Look at playlisting services
- We often say playlists are dead, they don’t usually get you real fans
- But they can push you algorithmically
Week 1
This is all systems go! Maximise you streams to get your popularity score up, get your fanbase mobilised:
- Personal mails out
- Alerts on your fan channel on the day of release
- Pin social posts promoting your track for the week
- Add the track to your own created playlists at the top
- Ask others to add it to their playlists
The goal is to create a graph that rises over the week to show momentum.
Results
If you follow and execute the plan you can see a 15-25 point uplift in your Spotify popularity score in month 1. This is enough to trigger Spotify’s discovery engine and help you to drive long-term growth on the platform.
Shameless Self-Promo
- Want to talk about your next release?
- Want to see what we can do to get your music heard with a full project managed release strategy?
Drop us a message.
