Updated: Feb 18
Have you ever seen your music added to a music playlist with thousands of followers, only to find that you get almost zero listens out of it? Have you ever paid to have your music submitted to a playlist, only to get rejected for no apparent reason? If so, you've been a victim of the dark side of the music playlist industry.
One word I really want to put the emphasis in my last phrase is "Industry" because as you will find out if you didn't already, that is what music was turned into by greed: a soulless industry, turning one of the most enriching elements of life, into a cheap money grabbing and dream-shattering machine.
Behind the scenes, a vast majority of playlists are managed by artists with an ulterior motive - to increase their own following and streams by any means necessary. These playlists are not created to provide listeners with a great music experience, they do not exist to help fellow musicians out by placing their music in front of listeners... these exist for one purpose and one alone: promote the playlist owner's own music.
And the result is a scam that's hurting artists every day and that sadly, I see happen day after day even in the music scene I'm part of, the retro/synth one.
In this post, I'll be talking about one such scam and how it works in detail. If you would like me to keep writing these posts here on PopArtAve and explore the other types of scams, let me know in the comment and I might turn this into a little series, tackling the different scammy aspects of playlisting.
The Base Assumption
In order to properly understand everything that follows, it's extremely important for you to realize what the real goal of a playlist is for many.
You might think that the goal of a playlist is to provide people with amazing music, or perhaps that it is to help