How Bots Ruined My Spotify Artist Page
Plus 25% off everything on my new webstore until Monday
First things first, if you’re a Spotify user, I need you to save and listen to the playlist I made above. Like I actually really need you to do this because of a strange situation I’m in. Let me explain. I pride myself on giving my readers the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to be an artist today and how the sausage is actually made behind the scenes in the music business. What I’m about to describe is something that few musicians in my position would be publicly honest about but nonetheless I’m gonna lay it out for you.
Every artist has a section on their Spotify page called Fans Also Like. This is an algorithmically generated list of similar artists and it’s a great tool for discovery. For example, if you’re into Earl Sweatshirt, this section might help you find out about MIKE, Navy Blue and Armand Hammer. The link between likeminded artists also extends to Autoplay after a playlist or album has ended, making it extremely helpful for growing on the platform. For me, it originally paired me with some other Canadian rappers, Polaris Prize nominees, etc. It made sense.
Then suddenly, a few months ago, my Fans Also Like section turned into this:
No offense to any of these artists who are all trying to achieve their dream, but I wasn’t familiar with any of them. I checked them out and many of them had only a few hundred monthly listeners. I did some research that showed that this problem is related to when songs are added onto bot playlists against your will.
In case you didn’t know, there’s a whole cottage industry of user generated playlists in the streaming world. Some of them are connected to sketchy online services that promise to add you to relevant playlists that will get you more streams, but only if you pay. Unfortunately, the listeners on these playlists are usually all bots and the plays are fake.
A new trick by the people behind these illicit services is that they’ll go search for potential customers by adding an artist’s song to a playlist for free for a brief period of time, which leads to the artist noticing a huge spike in plays on a song, looking for the playlist where it came from and then contacting the playlister email in the description to get added back on for a fee.
I went into Spotify For Artists to look at the analytics and noticed a spike ironically on my song “Bots”:
I saw something similar on my song “Wormhole.” The majority of plays over a couple days were all from Helsinki and somewhere called Falkenstein, Germany:
When I found the offending playlist, I noticed that there were a few other Canadian artists on there who were recently featured on Spotify’s Editorial playlist called Northern Bars along with me. This indicated that the bot playlister scrapes legitimate playlists for potential future customers.
Ever since this happened to me, it’s messed up my Fans Also Like, altering how my music is recommended to Spotify users. This is a huge problem. When your algorithm is messed up, it doesn’t know who to recommend your music to so it stops trying. This limits your chances of being discovered by fans who are likely to vibe with your music.
What can you do if this happens to you? My label and I have reported the playlist to Spotify and we’ve contacted the playlister to be removed from it. Apparently, if you update your Spotify artist bio with hyperlinks to relevant artists, it sends that information to the algorithm which can help fix the issue. Another thing you can do is make a playlist with your music alongside likeminded artists and share it with your fans to send the algorithm the correct message.
Which is partly why I made the playlist at the top of this post. The more people who listen to my music next to relevant artists, the sooner it will fix my Fans Also Like section. But at the same time, I’ve been wanting to make an all rap playlist for awhile anyway. People always ask me what rap I’m into so this is a catch-all response for that. I had a lot of fun putting it together and it’s been really good to drive along to while listening on random.
Some of you might wonder why I give a fuck about this at all. I’m literally complaining about getting more streams. Great question. These fake streams deprioritize your music on the platform, making it less likely for you to be recommended to real people. I only really started paying attention to Spotify around 2017-2018. What I’ve learned in the intervening years is that your monthly listeners and streams have a real world impact on whether you get booked for festivals or not, how much you get paid if you do get booked, and even where your name ends up on the poster.
So as much as I might not agree with everything that these streaming platforms do, I have to navigate them to have a music career in 2024. So if you have the time, save the playlist, put it on at your holiday party, go crazy with it. And if you wanna be really helpful, you can make your own playlist and put me on there with a bunch of similar artists and play it all the time. Let’s have a human vs machine moment and see what comes of it.
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In other news, I’m launching the Cadence Weapon webstore today!
To celebrate, you can use the code CWBF24 for 25% off anything on the site from now until Monday 11:59 pm ET.
On top of that, anyone who buys anything this weekend will also get a free SENNA shirt with their purchase!
To get your free shirt, just go to the Clothes section, click the SENNA shirt, choose your size and then add to cart. It'll show up as free in your cart if you have any other item in your cart with it.
You can find me updating my playlists or hanging on Bluesky, Twitter and Instagram. You can listen to my music on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp and you can get Cadence Weapon merchandise here. Read my monthly column in Hazlitt. Pick up your copy of Bedroom Rapper here and please rate it on Goodreads.
Crazy situation, thanks for explaining. Favorited the playlist for future listening.
The challenges with streaming certainly seem to outweigh the benefits. It’s ridiculous how much emphasis is put on streaming numbers instead of record sales or radio airplay (I listen to SiriusXM daily!).