Why Playlist Adds and Saves Matter More Than Streams
Did you know that for a stream to count on Spotify, you only need to listen to the song for 30 seconds? That means that if someone autoplays a song and they listen to it for over 30 seconds and then decide to skip the song, that still counts as a stream. If someone skips a song even if it counted as a stream, it will not get recommended to them anymore. That is one of the main reasons why streams are not as important as many creators think. It is a gut reaction that one song has more streams than another song, and that must mean it is a better performing track, but if they don't come back, how can you build a fanbase? People see the big number and want to optimize it as much as possible.
Saves, on the other hand, are very different from streams. They are an action someone has to do. Compared to a stream, which can often happen passively through playlists and autoplay. A person choosing to press a button to save the song or add it to a playlist signals to Spotify that they are actively engaging with the song. Saves also help Spotify develop its “taste profile” for a user.
From Indie on the Move:
"I watched an artist spend $4,000 on a playlist campaign last year. Got 200,000 streams in two weeks. Looked great in the group chat. Then the campaign ended, and monthly listeners dropped right back to where they started. The algorithm didn't care. Nothing stuck.”
Spotify taste profile
Spotify has created what they call the taste profile. It is a way to algorithmically generate recommendations and automatically generate playlists based on music that you have listened to. This taste profile takes many factors into account that Spotify is pretty transparent about. There are various actions that will cause tracks to be recommended, these include:
Searching for a track
Listening to the track
Skipping the track
Saving the track to Your Library
How much each of these affects your taste profile changes, according to Spotify. As you can see, even if someone listens to the song longer than 30 seconds, if they skip, it will negatively affect your track for their taste profile. Actions such as searching for something, listening to the majority of a track, or saving a song will positively affect the taste profile. As a result, focusing on an action like saving will get your music recommended to listeners who have saved your music, resulting in repeat listeners.
Spotify indicators
Spotify analytics has a few useful indicators that you can use to help you. One indicator is save rate. This shows the percentage of people who listen to your music are saving your track to their library. Also, Spotify shows where people are finding your music. These include:
Your profile
Listener’s libraries
Playlist
Algorithmic playlists
Radio
Autoplay.
The sources are divided into active and programmed sources. Active sources are things like your profile, the listener’s library, or the listener’s queue. Programmed sources are from automatically generated playlists, curated playlists, and other users’ playlists. Focusing on growing your active sources is important as they are the ones most likely to be repeat listeners.
How to focus on saves
There are a few things you can do when promoting your music to help optimize for saves. Setting up your songs to be saved in advance. Then, when running advertisements and promotions for your music, instead of asking people to stream your music, ask them to save your track.
At Defined Sound Records, we offer Spotify marketing and custom marketing services. Our marketing services create custom Meta ads and marketing campaigns for you. These ads will be displayed on Facebook and Instagram. We will create ads for you to optimize for saves over streams if you wish. We also pitch your tracks to playlist creators and more. Contact us today!
Alternatively, if you want us to do all of the marketing and spend our money promoting your music, please consider us for demos. You can submit a demo and learn more about what we’re looking for here.
Conclusion
In a world filled with bots and services aimed at artificially inflating stream numbers, streams are not as valuable a metric to aim for. Saves need an action from the listener and signal to Spotify that they like listening to you and your music through their taste profile. Focus on making your call to action in a marketing campaign to save your song or add it to a playlist.