Why purchasing streams and playlist placements can kill your Spotify Popularity score

It’s no secret that websites and services exist out there promising to get you thousands of streams or followers or even onto specific playlists with the selling point of helping promote your song. Often, these can range from $10 for a handful of streams, upwards to $1000+ for large amounts of followers/streams or playlist placements.

While this might sound great - (you get some nice looking numbers in your Spotify for Artists dashboard) - purchasing and using these methods can destroy your Spotify Popularity score in the long run. Let’s discuss why.

Streams don’t mean everything.

To the average user of Spotify, there is one main metrics when it comes to a single Spotify song: Stream count.

If you are a user of Spotify for Artists, you know there are more. And if you’re a user of Musicstax Metrics, you’ll know there’s another hidden metric: the Spotify Popularity Score. When it comes to tracks, there are other vital metrics not surfaced on the Spotify Player UI:

• Stream count

• Listener count

• Streams per listener

• Playlist adds

• Saves

• Popularity Score

As discussed in a previous article, the popularity score is made up of the above metrics to create a single-digit aggregate of the other metrics. This makes it easy for Spotify to weight songs internally in their algorithm based on how well they are doing across multiple metrics, not just streams. Spotify’s staff internally use this metric too when deciding if they should manually feature songs for example.

So why does purchasing streams negatively hurt the popularity score?

When you purchase streams, these are likely to be bots, not real people. Even if the website/service advertises them as real people, they are still likely to be bots or click farms - not real users who will engage with your music in the future. Unless they are running social media campaigns on your behalf, there isn’t really a way they can force real people to listen to your music, unless it’s a click farm which means those listeners aren’t going to engage with your music again, they’ll be off to listen to the next person who has purchased streams.

This is the part that harms your track's popularity score (and can also hurt your artist popularity score).

Let’s say you purchase 1,000 streams; your end stats might look something like:

• Stream count: 1,000

• Listener count: 1,000

• Streams per listener: 1

• Playlist adds: 0

• Saves: 0

If you were to look at this song’s metrics, it doesn’t look like those 1,000 people enjoyed the song. They only listened to it once, no one saved it, and it wasn’t added to any playlists. That would signal to Spotify that this most likely isn’t a good song due to the low/non-existent engagement. Let’s say, however, the service you are using makes these numbers look a bit more attractive:

• Stream count: 1,000

• Listener count: 500

• Streams per listener: 2

• Playlist adds: 90

• Saves: 150

Now that looks better. There’s more engagement, and it seems more natural. But here is where the issue lies with purchasing these fake streams/engagements. This is usually just an initial one-off hit on a song, and then your streams fall back to zero. Fake streams don’t tend to have recurring streams/engagement from these fake bot accounts, so in the end, this looks like a track that isn’t very popular in Spotify’s eyes. If you had 150 saves, you’d be expecting (if this was natural traffic) for more streams to come through from those accounts over time. These bot accounts are likely to be listening to such a wide random range of artists, that Spotify will have a hard time working out who they even should be pushing your music too, as your “listeners” don’t really have any sort of specific genre they listen to. You can actually notice that people are stream-botting when you look at their “similar artists”, and they are completely random other artists who aren’t even in the same genre at all. This is because you’ve used the same stream botting service.

Because the Spotify Popularity score is looking at all of these metrics over time, Spotify’s internal algorithm will most likely see that engagement has completely fallen off of a cliff and return this song back closer to 0% popularity. One of the main things we discovered when observing data on Musicstax is that it’s tough to recover a popularity score. You need to constantly push a song with real natural engagement for it to go up, and if it starts dropping, it can be challenging for it to go back up - leaving you with a dead track to the algorithm. All your previous data counts, so doing some dodgy stuff early on in your career can have ramifications down the line.

So, what about playlist placement purchases? Most of the time when you end up on a playlist placement you’ve purchased online, these playlists are being botted with the above method to make them look attractive. Ones which aren’t, tend to put you on quite random playlists which might have such a wide range of genres of music that people may not engage with your music, meaning your engagement metrics drop. If you’re a drum and bass artist placed on a generic pop playlist, you might find people skipping over your song, lowering your engagement score. Trying to get on ones specific to your genre is better, but you still run the risk of that being botted with fake streams meaning it tends to not be worth the risk. Instead, pushing natural growth is better. We’ll have an article out on that soon.

With Spotify’s business model being on royalty payments based on stream counts, they don’t take lightly to you botting your own songs, and have made it very clear they are clear they are clamping down on this. By doing so, you could see all your music removed from Spotify and fines from your distributor passed onto you.

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Be sure to check out Musicstax Metrics to monitor your Spotify popularity score.