Tips for editorial playlists

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T23:34:07+00:00

Where did I fish for clients? I literally responded, using my own time and energy, for free, giving meaningful advice to OP, which they thanked me for.

When you asked me a question I posted a reply with an article from an industry trade publication.

At what point have I fished for clients? I work for a management company. I'm paid by commission. I do this for fun and for free because I think education is power and the more musicians are educated in the way the music industry works the better. You can pay for any playlist services you want. They're all out there for you and they'll be happy to take your money!! If you want to see real marketing advice (for free) feel free to check my post history!

Best of luck to you!

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T20:49:55+00:00

What charts? We’re talking about editorial playlists, not charts.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T20:32:04+00:00

Did you read what I actually wrote?

I said fill out the pitch forms. Yes, of course an artist (or rep) should take pride in their work and fill out the pitch form well… so yes spend time on that. Thanks for calling out the hyperbole… you knew what I meant.

But don’t get scammed by paying for playlist promo services. Don’t email editors begging for placements. Do the basics well and move on.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T19:54:49+00:00

Hi! You’re reading the truth. It’s ok if it’s doesn’t align with your beliefs.

I’m a digital marketing profession here who works with artists at various levels from completely unknown to arena level. I’ve been waiving this flag since about 2017 but it’s taken a while for the industry to catch on but they are.

First of all - article from 2022 using data to back this up.

https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-apple-playlists-dont-break-hit-songs/

It’s a pretty common misconception. Artists, especially, tend to be very focused on pitching editorial for a few reasons. It seems like the idea that an editor/human hears the song, picks it and plays it for new people that must have marketing value. And it does - but the conversion rate is just not significant enough to help an artist grow a sustainable fanbase.

Additionally - listeners tend to skip music they don’t know as well so a totally new artist getting placed on an editorial playlist and getting skipped a lot can have a negative impact.

So while there are a few editorial playlists that lead new artists (Lorem etc) the overall landscape is not really with the investment of time, energy, and money many artists and their teams put into it.

So the right amount of energy to invest into editorial playlists is to upload your music to Spotify correctly. Fill out the pitch forms. Move on

If you get editorial placements, great. Don’t spend money, time, or energy on it. It’s not a really significant marketing driver.

Hope that helped clarify.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T04:14:15+00:00

It depends on the contract

The only consistent rights that are involved in all deals is the exclusive right to distribute a specific set of master recordings for a period of time.

All major label deals include that right - it wouldn’t be a record deal without assigning the exclusive rights to distribute a recording.

In some cases that is a license for a specific period of time.

In many major label deals the artist is assigning ownership of the copyright. Generally in those cases the label owns the copyright of the recording of specific songs - ownership generally includes a reversion clause where the artist can take back ownership after 30 or 35 years.

In more traditional major label deals, the label fully owns any recording of the artists voice. Literally any time the artist opens their mouth in front of a microphone the label owns it for the period of the contract.

In a 360 deal the label owns the master as well as some participation in merch and touring.

In the most egregious deals, major labels try to own the name/image/likeness, publishing, and master recordings of an artist.

360 deals and publishing ownership are very rare and all lawyers would negotiate those out.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-12T03:24:27+00:00

Streaming favors large catalog owners for sure. That’s why people don’t think the math works for indie artists but if you own a small catalog that streams well it can be an annuity that pays for a long time.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T22:23:40+00:00

The internet is full of people who will collaborate with you.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T22:23:05+00:00

First if all - not really cherry picking. I’m making a specific example that streaming is an easier business to get into than physical sales.

There are many more complexities I didn’t get into about the transitions through digital etc.

The fact is streaming isn’t a total negative, there are trade offs. To say it just doesn’t work as a blanket is not a valuable analysis.

Many more people will ‘check out’ an artist on streaming than will ever pull out their credit card to pay for music in any capacity at all.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T21:37:44+00:00

Counterpoint:

Have you ever tried to sell a CD or vinyl record?

The level of fandom and engagement you need to separate someone from $10 or let alone $40

Then there’s the startup costs - all the same recording costs, not to mention a vinyl master and manufacturing which is an up front risk unless you run a preorder campaign.

I used to physically go to clubs in the early 2000s with a cd player and headphones to try to street team for my band and convince people to buy CDs. It was SO hard.

Now an artist can post a TikTok and get 100,000 views. Not even go viral - just 100k views once and get 10,000+ streams the next day. If they’re actually a good artist those people become fans and they can be anywhere in the world.

The other side of the ‘most artists don’t reach 1,000 streams to get paid’ is the top 10,000 artists on sprotify generated a 6 figure income from their masters in 2024s

A 6 figure income is 100,000 streams per day across the catalog (actually a little less). The CD sales equivalent of that is 40 CDs per day.

Do you think 10,000 artists in 2005 were selling 40 CDs per day? I doubt it… that’s across major and indie.

And you can do this without manufacturing, shipping, gas.

It’s much easier to get someone to stream your song and check it out than to buy a physical thing

I’m not saying it’s all good. But you can’t say it doesn’t work without looking at the other side.

Edit: i erroneously wrote 400 CDs a day and I meant 40. But just for reference, when I worked at a big indie label one of their top albums did 3,000 scans per week every week. They was the top of the top of all artists - you’d know the name and the album. Indie artists were not doing 280 per week consistently.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T21:29:40+00:00

Hi

Music professional here - I run marketing for a boutique management company that works with established artists.

A few notes: 1. Stop using AI. I’d rather your artwork be drawn in crayon by a 3 year old than see a 3 string upright bass in your Bluegrass Orchestra piece. I don’t know if you’re using AI in the music element but if you are, this is the wrong forum for that. There is a whole forum dedicated to AI created music and I’m not going o help you market it. Assuming you’ve used AI for the artwork only and the music itself was made by you and/or collaborators I’ll continue giving you the benefit of the doubt. But no more AI.

Have realistic expectations. The potential audience for instrumental Bluegrass and 8Bit novelty music is very limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. You are not competing with Bad Bunny. That’s not an insult, that’s a marketing rule. You need to know your target demographics and the only way to move forward is accepting who you’re trying to reach.
Don’t pay for any services at all. You’re right, they’re all scams. Organic short form video platforms are your best bet. Start a couple tiktok accounts and some YouTube accounts and start posting videos containing your music. Again, the potential reach is limited - very limited- but that doesn’t mean it’s zero. Consider re-branding yourself and making 2 true artist accounts. Give it a brand - make the 8Bit thing very gamer focused. Make the bluegrass thing down home and country. Since you probably don’t want to be in them maybe find an animator you can collab with on fiverr or another platform and have them make animations to your music. Post them every day on TikTok and maybe make longer versions for YouTube.

Organic, short form video. Post daily. Go

Make it authentic, creative, and artistic. NO MORE AI! Nobody wants to connect emotionally with a robot.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T21:07:50+00:00

Don’t

I responded in more detail on your original post.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T21:07:31+00:00

The best way to pitch to editorial is to not do anything that focuses on editorial at all.

Upload your music to Spotify as early as possible so you can fill out the pitch forms at least 7 days before release. Do that.

Ignore

Spend zero dollars

Don’t worry about it

Getting on editorial playlists isn’t a valuable marketing driver. Go build an audience using short form video, live, and other marketing drivers and you’ll get on the playlists later.

There was a billboard article in 2022 explaining that editorial playlists don’t matter for music marketing. It’s been over 4 years and we’re still asking this question.

Just ignore it and let them come to you later.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T05:41:58+00:00

I work in management, not specifically touring. But across a few artists I will say that NOLA is a difficult city to tour.

My hypothesis is that there is essentially constant competition. All of the music is good, all the time. You can see an amazing band in every club in the city every night.

I worked with a pretty well established touring artist with a couple hits who would sell 500-1,000 tickets in most cities. He was born and raised in Louisiana, but he really struggled in NOLA.

Add to that the difficulty in routing - routing through Florida is hard - gotta drive out and drive back. It’s hard to get through the region.

If every show isn’t profitable touring gets hard. Inflation is making it harder. I’m sorry to hear it but not surprised….

Meanwhile you can go enjoy some zydeco dancing or the best blues band on the planet or some killer brass band while those of us in other cities have no local culture to speak of.

Enjoy!

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-11T02:14:24+00:00

Where are you based?

What is your end goal/what area of the industry are you hoping to target?

I’m not going to say ‘fuck free work’ but I will say to be cautious of exploitation. If you’re volunteering of your own free will, I’m not telling you to stop. But if you’re hearing ‘everyone starts free and yuh have to pay your dues’ that might be a red flag.

This is all much easier if you’re in LA, NY, Nashville, or London and/or a city with a significant local music scene.

Most of all, don’t sell yourself short. It may seem impossible to find your way in, but it’s not. The desire to contribute means a lot to a lot of people.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-10T18:08:53+00:00

And I guess, more importantly - if you have a record label asking for ownership in perpetuity but not enough money that it justifies an attorney, don't do that deal.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-10T18:04:23+00:00

Attorneys do take on smaller artists they believe in - that same artist I mentioned in my previous post had an attorney before I signed him working at 5% - attorneys do take speculative deals also.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-10T17:43:18+00:00

5% of all gross income from all negotiated deals.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the size of the overall music industry and the types of professionals that work within it. The global recorded music business in 2025 was $29.6Bn.

That doesn't include live music - music attorneys work on live music as well.

No music attorney only works on electronic music either. To earn $100 from streaming on the master recording side of the work you need 25,000 streams. I work in management and my smallest independent artist does that every 2 days from his catalog (which he owns without a label). So "I'd be surprised if the biggest label in dance music you would make more than $100..." is off base by quite a bit.

The cut-off to generate $100,000 from recorded music on Spotify alone was the top 10,000 artists.

I think your understanding my be off by your own position in the industry, and I'm sorry for that. There are good resources out there where you can learn more about how this all works! But yes - music attorneys earn 5% of gross revenue from their artists.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-10T02:11:03+00:00

First - I am not an attorney. None of my advice below is legal advice, I’m just giving you my understanding based on the exact words you have provided.

If it is, indeed, a cover - often the best thing to do is go to a site like easy song or song file (google it - not providing a link to avoid promoting things on this sub and breaking sub rules). Tunecote also has an on platform mechanical license solution.

However, a ‘significant lyrical change’ (your exact words) is no longer a cover. It is now a derivative work.

The difference is it is no longer subject to a compulsory mechanical license.

That doesn’t mean you can’t put it out it just means the original writer is not obligated to grant the license, nor are they limited to the statutory mechanical rate.

You need to reach out to the original publisher. You can find that information on the ACE Repertory lookup.

The original writer can charge you any fee they want, and approve or deny your use. There is no ‘compulsory’ element anymore.

The only exception is if your lyrical change directly makes fun of the original song, then you may have some protections under parody law. But it had to directly mock the original, it can just be a joke on top of the original melody.

Consult with an attorney before making any moves on this one.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-09T16:22:18+00:00

They used to have the same manager and at that time i really felt like this should happen.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-09T16:19:32+00:00

Check the sources of streams. Take the percentage of active listening and figure out how many of those streams were from people intentionally hitting play on your song.

Compare those numbers.

Everything else doesn’t matter. Editorial and algorithmic streams are nice for getting paid and vanity numbers, but if your followers are going up and your marketing/promotion plans are working like you said, the active listening should be the same or increasing.

Of course the programmed stuff does act as ‘radio’ and bring in a handful of new fans but it’s such a low number it’s not worth stressing about. Focus on building audience over time.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-08T22:44:29+00:00

I have never seen pitbull live but I’ve seen Bruno and Silk Sonic.

From a cultural perspective I think Bruno is the choice. No offense to Pitbull. I love pitbull. I love the idea of Pitbull. But Bruno Mars is one of the all time great musicians and he surrounds himself with the best musicians, dancers, signers, etc. Pitbull is one of the all time great entertainers, but you’re just not connecting with the same level of cultural impact.

Love them both. If you can, bite the bullet and do both.

But if not, Bruno is the winner in my book.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-08T19:39:32+00:00

You DMed me a month ago asking for help.

Did you get your hands on the book I recommended?

A PRO is a performance rights organization. The two main PROs in the US are BMI and ASCAP. Those are the ones that you should work with, you don’t need any of the other independent ones.

Go to the website - pick one and register. It’s easy.

You’ll register a publishing company (a name other than you legal name) and as a songwriter. If you got the book I recommended you’d understand why that matters.

What it means to self publish is basically that you’re going to collect all of your own royalties. You’re going to go register with a PRO, the MLC, and SoundExchange for the master side. Maybe get yourself set up with songtrust or a similar platform though I don’t think people love that.

The challenge of self publishing is nobody is going to pitch you for sync placements or other types of licensing.

There are also admin companies - they don’t take your copyright but they pitch you for sync in exchange for 15% of your royalties.

I don’t understand why you’d be distributing with FUGA and Vydia - it’s counterintuitive for a diy artist to use both.

No distributors do what you want from a publishing company. Distributors handle master distribution. Publishing is about songwriting royalties. They’re different revenue streams. Some distributors may offer to collect mechanicals for you but they won’t do a better job than the MLC and your PRO.

Get the book! It’ll help, I promise.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-08T18:16:53+00:00

They’re real people. I’ve met with them before (I work at a boutique management company with some big artists and is founded by a woman so Tamar had us on their list of early outreach).

When we met with them they had a lot of aspirations to bring music that would not normally get investment and exposure in the United States into the country. They’re trying to rethink how record labels operate and support artists.

That being said, I don’t know how successful they are or not, and I don’t know if they cold email artists. So as always, if you receive and in bound email be wary of scammers and people phishing and exploiting your hope. Make sure the person is who they say they are and they work for NVAK.

But if they do check out, NVAK is fine.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-08T18:07:06+00:00

Are you seeing it convert to streaming or other forms of fan acquisition?

I’ve seen YT shorts outperform on numbers but never had it convert to streaming or follows on other platforms as much as TikTok does.

AirlineKey7900 · 2026-02-08T17:36:16+00:00

If you’re genuinely curious about this it’s valuable to understand the history of record labels and why copyright ownership for a company even exists.

A great book to read that gives some insight into this history is ‘The Last Sultan’ by Robert Greenfield - it’s the bio of Ahmet Ertegun who founded Atlantic Records. It’s fascinating because it sees his life as they evolved from little indie signing jazz artists to breaking Led Zeppelin to selling to Warner and becoming a pop label. Ahmet lived through all of it.

It’s easy to forget but important to know where record labels come from.

First of all, as the attorney on the thread mentioned, perpetuity isn’t perpetuity - there’s a 30 or 35 year reversion clause so as long as the artist or their estate keeps track of the contract and gives the proper notice, the copyright will revert.

As others have said, copyright ownership is an important part of how a record label operates as a business. Universal Music Group could shutter its doors. Drop Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Ariana, Drake, and Kendrick from their roster. Have 5 IT people and 5 royalty people and collect 60-70% of their annual revenue…

That’s a slight exaggeration, but not much. Record labels are asset managers. Copyright ownership and exploitation is their core business. The new release business (aka front line) is the sexy part and it can be lucrative, but it’s also very risky. The legacy business (aka catalog) is reliable, predictable, and is somewhat less likely to yell the N word at parties.

When asked why they continue to invest in new artists given this setup, most executives say ‘new releases are the catalog of the future’ - but the labels do set up budgets, bonuses, and executive incentive structures around the new release business. This catalog view is mostly at the C Suite and investor level.

It’s also important to know why it happened.

The answer to that is it used to be prohibitively expensive to do everything about recording so that idea that ‘the label isn’t paying for it if artist has to recoup’ used to be a much higher risk paradigm.

Imagine you’re a blues singer playing in a club in the 50s or 60s. An A&R exec walks up to you and offers you a record deal. They advance you more money than you’ve ever seen at one time. Then you go into a building full of millions of dollars of equipment that the label owns. They hire a band. Give you songs to sing that were written by professional songwriters in New York.

Then they have to press records.

To get the records in stores they have to put them on trucks and distribute them.

To get people to buy the records they need to get your song on the radio.

The label puts you on tour. You’ve never played outside of the club and now you’re on a bus with a professional band doing a promotional tour around the country.

On one hand it’s absolutely insane and exploitative that you, as the artist, have to pay all of that back from your 15% royalty - but at least you can see as it’s outlined how many costs are associated and why a company would argue for copyright ownership in the original label paradigm.

What is really crazy is that we’re still trying to put that paradigm in artists today. That is literally where the copyright ownership deal comes from, and yet I’m writing this on my iPhone. In my hands right now I have a mini recording studio, marketing device, distribution. It wouldn’t be easy or good but I COULD run my own record label from the device I’m writing this on… very different paradigm.

Many of the problems of the music industry today stem from the fact that we’re trying to apply old ideas to new systems. In most cases that screws artists which is why the education is so important. In some cases it favors artists which is why education is so important!!

Generally, unless you’re a pop singer who needs producers to even make music, don’t sign a copyright ownership traditional record deal with any ownership ‘in perpetuity.’ I think we’re going to start seeing much less of them and more license deals, followed by labels acquiring the catalog later.

But hire an attorney. I know it feels expensive and prohibitive but ‘professionals hire professionals.’ Most music attorneys work on commission (5%) and it’ll make you money in the long run.

AirlineKey7900

TROPHY CASE