Video summary
Spotify's playlist ecosystem has undergone a significant, yet largely unnoticed, transformation where the traditional power of editorial playlists is diminishing while paid placement schemes are being aggressively dismantled. A comprehensive report from Playlist Supply reveals that Spotify silently cracked down on "pay-for-play" networks in 2025, removing over 75 million spammy tracks and deleting nearly half a million discovered-on placements. This cleanup has caused the follower counts of major editorial lists like Rap Caviar to decline for the first time in eight years, signaling a shift away from inflated metrics toward authentic listener behavior. Consequently, the era of buying slots on curated lists is effectively over, as Spotify now actively hunts down and removes accounts that operate as storefronts for paid placements, protecting artists from fake streams and shadowbans.
The landscape of music discovery has fundamentally shifted to favor independent playlists over Spotify's own editorial giants, particularly for emerging artists. Data shows that for artists with fewer than one million monthly listeners, independent playlists drive between 80% and 90% of new discovery, whereas Spotify's official lists only become relevant once an artist is already established. While editorial playlists serve to confirm an artist's status among massive audiences, the real engine for growth lies in smaller, highly engaged independent curators who can introduce music to new listeners. This trend indicates that the algorithmic and personalized nature of modern listening habits has reduced the influence of human curation, making small, niche lists far more effective at breaking artists than the massive, impersonal editorial machine.
To succeed in this new environment, artists must adopt a multi-pronged strategy that focuses on authenticity and targeted outreach rather than purchasing exposure. The most effective approach involves submitting every song to Spotify's editorial team for consideration, maintaining a high-quality personal artist playlist to facilitate organic discovery, and utilizing tools like Playlist Supply to find legitimate independent curators who actively seek new music. It is crucial to distinguish between genuine submissions and paid placements; while having an email address on a playlist is acceptable for community building, selling slots or running promotional networks that mimic submission forms will lead to account deletion. By targeting playlists slightly above their current level and avoiding low-quality networks, artists can build a sustainable fanbase that relies on real listener connections rather than artificial inflation.
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So, playlists on Spotify have totally
changed. I've not seen anyone notice
this huge change. Not one publication or
influencer has said a word. Now, there
is something a lot of people have been
saying, which is the power of editorial
playlists have been slipping. And while
some clouds will say editorial playlists
are dead, that's far from the truth. But
what replaced them kind of blew my mind.
And to make things even more
interesting, so many of you have been
complaining for years that the playlists
you find from curators have all been
paid slots and those have shockingly
died and been replaced. So obviously you
want to know what the hell is going on.
So in this video, I'm going to show you
how to win at playlists in 2026 with the
new rules. So to break down where this
video is going to go, there's a new
report that tracked 400 editorial
playlists across three and a half years
of daily follower data. And then they
went back and rechecked 825,000
artist playlists to see which ones
Spotify deleted and pulled nearly
500,000 discovered on placements to find
out where artists actually get found
since that's the one provable way to do
that. So, we're going to go over what
they found, which playlists Spotify have
been quietly deleting, and how to spot
one before you pay it, and why all four
of the biggest editorial playlists are
now losing followers, and where
discovery is really happening for
artists at all different sizes. And
lastly, I'm going to give you an
actionable way to turn this into fans.
So, I want to start off by saying this
report comes from Playlist Supply, who
if you're not familiar with makes tons
of helpful tools for musicians like
radiopromo.io,
syncplacement.com, and booking agent io.
All of which we've covered before, and I
have videos on all of them that are
linked below. But I want to say this is
not sponsored content from them. Since
they gave me this research and did all
of it, I didn't feel right taking money.
But there will be a discount code where
you can use that for their amazing new
tool which I'll talk about a bit later.
So I want to say Poliola never died. It
just changes formats all the time.
Here's the thing that's true across the
entire history of the music business.
Wherever money flows into music
promotion, somebody shows up to
manipulate it. Radio had poliola,
independent promoters, envelopes, you
know, that whole thing. And it got so
bad the government had to get involved
twice. Then streaming came along and
everybody acted like we'd invented a
clean system. And within about four
years, playlist had bots, payforplay
stuff, and dudes on Fiverr selling you a
placement on playlists that looked like
beast mode with 100,000 bots that would
get you shadowbanned from Spotify. And a
lot of you went through all of this. But
where this gets interesting is after
years of complaints, Spotify silently
finally started cracking down in 2025
and getting rid of Poliola Playlist. And
Playlist Supply were one of the ones who
could spot it since they had the best
directory of independent playlists. So,
I double checked this and Spotify
removed over 75 million spammy tracks in
a single year. That's not a marketing
number that Spotify's own announcement
from their newsroom back in September of
2025. 75 million. And since April of
2025, they've been clawing back streams
they count as fake, including from
massive artists. Sorry, Drake. Now, what
Playlist Supply did with that is the
smart part. They figured if this cleanup
is real and not a press release, then
the inflated playlist should start
deflating. So, they tracked the daily
follower accounts of the biggest
playlists on the platform to see if the
giants came down, and they did. But this
also got rid of all those playlists you
would find that would have emails listed
and you'd waste your time as they would
ask you for crazy amounts of money just
to get on a playlist where they took
some of that money and bought bots. So,
you feel like you got something from it
when really you were getting fake fans
that never listened again once you're
removed from this playlist. But this is
where things got really interesting is
while those botted playlists
disappeared, a lot of the editorial
playlists started to have fewer
subscribers. Think of it this way. Rap
Caviar is the most powerful playlist in
hip-hop and the most followed playlist
in music, period. It's been the single
most valuable piece of real estate in
rap for a decade and Spotify's most
active brand playlist. And for its
entire track life from 2017 all the way
up to early 2025, it did one thing every
quarter. It went up every single quarter
for eight years. It peaked at 16.16
million followers on April 19th of 2025
and then it turned 13 straight months of
decline since down to 15.74 million.
Now, let me be honest with you about the
size of that because I'm not going to
oversell it and neither did they. That's
a drop of 2.6%. That is not a collapse.
Nobody at Spotify is panicking about Rap
Caviar and it's not dead like all these
dumb influencers you guys watch said
send me videos of. But it's the first
reversal in 8 years on a chart that
literally had never gone down. And it
happened right when the fake stream
cleanup started. That's not nothing. I
can tell you straight up, editorial
playlists still are a big change in an
artist trajectory. If they're doing
other things right, it can really help
you get discovered by a ton of new fans
who last. It can be a big leap in an
artist's career. But it's clear that the
algorithmic playlists like Daily Mix or
their personalized genre playlists have
really been taking up a lot of the
influence of listeners habits rather
than what the editorial team is choosing
these algorithmic playlists predict that
you're going to want to listen to. And
so that means that a lot of people are
using those playlists as a vibe or a
mood as Spotify likes to say more than
the editorial playlists. More on that
though a little bit later. And it's not
just Rap Caviar I should say. Playlist
Supply tracked 400 playlists across
three and a half years of daily follower
data and the top 200 Spotify owned lists
against the top 200 independent ones.
And since January of 2023, the
independents grew 70%. Spotify's own
giants grew 19%. It's been flat for that
last 12 months. In just the last year,
it's 10% growth for independence versus
1% for Spotify's own. And here's the
stat that actually made me laugh out
loud. Four out of the four most followed
playlists on the entire platform are now
losing followers. Today's top hits, top
50 Global, Rap Caviar, and Viva Latino.
But this is the part that will save you
money, so don't skip this. In this
report, they took 825,000 playlists that
were all alive months earlier and went
back and rechecked them. Nearly 2% had
been deleted. And then they looked at
what the dead ones had in common. The
deleted playlists were three and a half
times more likely to have been
advertising for submissions by email.
They were 2.2 two times more likely to
have been running in an Instagram promo
account. Almost 20% of the curators
behind those deletions didn't just lose
the playlist. They lost their entire
Spotify account and they watched one
single payfor-play network of 125
playlists disappear in full. Spotify is
deleting the pay-forplay layer at more
than double the rate the normal playlist
disappear. So, think about what that
means for you practically. That guy in
your DMs with the submission email in
the playlist bio and the promo Instagram
account and the 400,000 followers, the
one who wants 300 bucks, you're not
buying a placement anymore. You're not
buying a seed on a playlist that is a
meaningfully higher chance of not
existing in 6 months. That's just going
to be run by bots or listeners they did
a poor job of advertising to. And that
means you're probably handing your
song's algorithmic connections to an
account Spotify is actively hunting and
probably going to do bad things for you.
No more paying $300 to make your own
career worse. And before anyone comes
for me in the comments, yes, I know I've
told you to put a submission email on
your own artist playlist. That advice is
still fine. The correlation here isn't
having an email is bad. It's that
pay-per-play operations that advertise
for submissions as a storefront and a
means for profit are going to go away
when Spotify sees them get reported. If
you're writing a playlist for your scene
and letting people send you songs is not
the same as a network of 125 lists
selling slots. And this is not the same
as SubmitHub either. That's
consideration. The problem has always
been pay for placement. That is
guaranteed, not submissions and
consideration. But I'm not going to
pretend the overlap doesn't exist. So
just don't sell placements and you're
fine. But let's talk about where Spotify
discovery actually happens. If the
inflated giants are deflating, discovery
has to be happening somewhere else. So,
playlists apply for this report went to
Spotify's discovered on data. If you
never scrolled down on your artist page,
discovered on is the section that shows
you which playlists are actually
bringing you new listeners, not just
playing you, bringing you people who had
never heard you before. And the reason
that number matters more than any other
number in this conversation is that you
don't generate it and the curator
doesn't generate it. Spotify does from
real listener behavior that they've
determined to be authentic. So, this
report analyzed over a 100,000 artists
and nearly 500,000 of those placements.
And for every single artist under a
million monthly listeners, independent
playlists are driving somewhere between
80 and 90% of new discovery. That's
pretty crazy. Look at the shape of that
chart. If you're at 10 to 50,000 monthly
listeners, 92% of your discovery is
coming from independent playlists.
Spotify's own lists are 1% at the bottom
of the market. 1%. Spotify playlists
often only show up once you're already
huge. And by then, they're not
discovering you, they're confirming you.
This is similar to what Sam Dubof said
in the interview I did with them, which
you could watch via link in the
description. Independent artists are
largely doing a lot of the early
discovery. And then editorial is often,
not always, doing a lot of the
confirming. And what was really
interesting is after Playo Supply first
showed me this report, Spotify seemingly
confirmed this with this chart that they
released in their most recent fan study,
which is if you notice the active
discoveries is the biggest chunk of that
chart, and that's where you find those
playlists. So, this tells me that the
artist playlist I've been telling you to
make for 6 and 1/2 years are what does a
lot of the discovery, as well as the
curated artist playlists you can submit
to. If you don't know what I'm talking
about, watch the video on the screen,
which is linked in the description here,
where I tell you how to use Spotify RS
playlist to get your music discovered.
So, here's where to focus your
playlisting strategy on Spotify. All of
Spotify's own discovery, the entire
editorial machine, runs through about
12,000 playlists. Independent discovery
is spread across 250,000
lists. And across all 30 genres that
Playlist Supply looked at for this
report, the independent playlists are
smaller than Spotify's own. And follower
for follower, they discover 10 to 30
times more artists, which means the
people who follow these playlists are
very engaged with them. Smaller lists,
way more discovery per follower because
a real creator with 4,000 engaged
listeners beats a monolith that people
put on and ignore. I think about my own
listening habits. There's playlists like
Music at Midnight and Ambient Ritual
that I use for a lot of my music
discovery. So, with this report,
Playlist Supply, who's always been the
best directory for these playlists,
decided to up their game and built an
even better tool for their product. And
it's going to save you time and only
find you the highest quality playlist.
For years, Playlist Supply had that
problem that across thousands of genres,
you were all searching different things
and there's no way to keep track of the
mass of everchanging playlists. But one
thing they realized is only tracking the
playlists in artists discovered on
playlist shows that these are real
playlists that Spotify users find
artists through and get them new fans.
So now playlist supply has a searchable
chart of over a 100,000 independent
playlists ranked by real discovery
instead of follower account. For any
playlist, you can see how many artists
actually found real listeners through it
according to Spotify. Its genre fit,
what size artist typically ends up on
it, and whether the curator can be
reached at all. Look at these rows.
These are real playlists from the
hip-hop chart, all discovering artists
under 50,000 monthly listeners. And you
can filter for playlists that break
artists at your level, which if you
watched literally any of my playlist
videos is the exact same principle I
scream about constantly. Targeting
slightly above where you are, not the
move. And you can notice some of them
say no contact on file. That's honest to
them to show you. And it's a real
limitation. Some of the best lists have
no way in because they're curated by a
real curator. This finds you real
playlist instead of the fake ones and
tells you which ones actually move
people. This is genuinely useful and it
replaces about 40 hours of manually
clicking through curator bios, which
I've personally done and hate. The
pricing for it is on the screen right
now if you want to dive into their tool.
So, here's the fun thing. The full
report is actually free. You don't have
to buy anything to read it. It's at
playlistupply.com and if you use the
link in the description, it helps
support our channel. And if you decide
to sign up with Playlistup Supply, you
get their current best deal for my
viewers. That link is also on the screen
now. But I know you want to know how to
win on playlist in 2026. So, let me give
you some clear directions. Submit every
song you care about to Spotify editorial
playlist. In my last video, I
interviewed Sam Dubof from Spotify for
Artists, and he insists they really do
get read and artists get breaks from
them all the time. And if you've missed
the definitive video I made on how you
submit to editorial playlists and how to
write one, that's also in the
description. I've said for nearly the
entirety of this channel to use playlist
supply to find the best independent
curators who make playlists and are
legit and can get you fans. That is only
more true today. I've also said for 6
years to make your own artist playlist.
And below I have a link on how I do it
and how many of the people in our
community have gotten hundreds of
thousands of fans through this
technique. And I've long said it's worth
taking a few minutes to look at submit
hub and if there's a playlist you really
feel you're a match to to submit there.
but do not carpet bomb them and submit
to tons of lowquality playlists. And
that's the game. So, here's the thing.
While you just learned all this, if you
really want to grow your fan base, you
need to understand how to build those
Spotify artist RS playlists. And
luckily, I have that guide for you,
which is on the screen right now or in
the description. Thanks for watching.