The Playlist Framework: Developing Instant Traction

All artists should know the true value of their own branded playlists, and why they're crucial for an artist's development. Neglecting playlists could put new releases in an almost impossible position. Forget about pre-save campaigns, email building, and all the things you read about online.

A music blog is the perfect foundation and starting point for your songs or tracks. The reasons are: you learn about formatting and SEO, such as titles and meta descriptions, which also happens to be all playlists' main structural format.

The Basic Principles

If you create your branded playlist with only your own songs, you will fail. If you're a content creator or music lover that has an interest or would like a popular or viral playlist, follow these formatting steps to give your playlist the best possible chance of success:

1. Using your mobile's built-in notepad, copy the song's URL and paste it into your notepad. Search engines penalize any form of duplication; this method eliminates duplication. (You're not copying songs from another playlist).

2. When you have the songs, work out the overall mood. Is your playlist draft sad, romantic, high or low energy? Let's say for example: I wanted to create a "Midnight Playlist." Three of those four moods would fit perfectly.

3. Now it's time to choose a "Title and Description." This is where the knowledge from writing a music blog really comes in handy. Just knowing about title lengths and the description's maximum characters to use puts you in the strongest position possible, at this stage anyways.

4. Now let's think about the playlist cover. You 100% do not want to be using any art found on any platform. This is duplication and copyright infringement.

5. Create your own unique playlist cover that matches the theme of your playlist. The crucial steps that most playlist curators do not do are these:

   5a. HQ cover art—if you need to enhance your cover art, there's plenty of free apps you can use.

   5b. Once you have the enhanced cover art, you need to rename the image details to match the playlist title.

   5c. This is 100% the best format for image file details: midnight_playlist_cover.jpg. This format will give you the best possible chance of ranking highly for search engine images.

Before You Publish

Before you publish your playlist on any streaming platform consider these alternatives:

1. Keep the exact format as mentioned above, now think about your song selection.

2. How to improve your song selection

   Pick a new release from a top artist that matches the mood of the playlist. The track's popularity rating will hurt the overall playlist rating at first, but as that track's rating improves so does your playlist rating.

I have purposely left out the branded names of streaming platforms and search engines. If you are unsure which streaming platform to use? Go with the one that starts with an "S." If you choose more than one platform, then the duplication and copyright comes into play.

Updating and Promoting Playlists

If you already have playlists you would like to update, do not use any playlist transfer service or app. What happens is the songs get swapped out for lower popularity album versions, which massively hurts your overall playlist rating, and will take you ages to fix.

Is this just for new playlists?

Absolutely not, established and even viral playlists can benefit from all or some of the above. All playlists are at risk of being taken down. If you follow the above mention principles, you will add a massive layer of protection to your playlist or playlists.

Unless you have a massive following on social media, do not promote your playlist, or write about it on your music blog. The reason is quite simply duplication and copyright. These could negatively affect not only your playlist but your blog.

In my next post I will write about one of my playlists, but in a way that doesn't compromise my blog or playlist.

If you would like to see a live example of how my deep-linking works, so my track automatically plays when someone clicks on my playlist link — Check it out on Spotify.