Master the Discover Weekly Algorithm: Strategies to Get Your Music Noticed on Spotify

Hey, quick announcement before I get into today’s email topic:

Over the past few months, I’ve written multiple times about the value of building your own popular genre playlist. In fact, the tactic came up again just last week in the mailbag as a response to my question, “What’s working in your music marketing?”

So I’ve decided that, in October, I’m going to run a live cohort to help folks put this strategy into practice.

I’m calling this the Build Your Own Playlist Challenge, and I wrote up a little Google doc to explain the details.

➡️ You can read it here.

I’m planning to do some focused promotion the week before launching the challenge (and don’t worry, I’ll give you a chance to opt out if you want to avoid hearing about it.) But for now, I just wanted to give you a heads up so that you know it’s coming.

Okay, so that’s that. Now onto our email topic of the day:

Let’s talk about the formula for triggering the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify.

First, some context:

Discover Weekly, for the unfamiliar, is Spotify’s preeminent algorithmic playlist for new music discovery. It’s the algorithmic equivalent of your music-obsessed friend giving you a weekly mixtape of new songs they think you’ll like. It’s updated for each Spotify user every Monday.

It’s great. But it’s not some Holy Grail.

Streams from Discover Weekly – like streams from any playlist – tend not to be highly engaged, because playlists are often put on as background music. And while you can see huge jumps in your streaming audience when you hit Discover Weekly, you’ll sometimes see a baby step up, then a baby step back down, and then nothing else.

With all of that said, Discover Weekly is still one of my favorite things about Spotify.

When you do see it kick in for real, it’ll look something like this:

That jump – which, in the image above, is more than four times the previous number of streams per day – represents an awesome opportunity to reach new fans.

Here’s how to make it happen.

Let’s start with two basic formulas:

First, there’s a rule of thumb that you will trigger Discover Weekly if you can reach 10,000 streams on a song in a 28-day period with a 10% or greater save rate.

_{(Save rate isn’t shown in your Spotify for Artists metrics, but it’s just saves / listeners.)}

For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen a song hit those numbers and not trigger Discover Weekly.

Second, there’s a rule of thumb that you will trigger Discover Weekly if you can reach a Spotify song popularity score of 30 or more. Spotify popularity score is a rating from 0 to 100 that – you guessed it – represents how popular a given song or artist is.

For what it’s worth, I don’t pay too much attention to popularity score; it’s kind of interesting, but I think of it as a secondary, lagging metric. In other words, the way to increase your popularity score is to get more streams, saves, and repeat listens. So I pay more attention to streams, saves, and repeat listens.

Okay, let’s look at some real life examples.

Here’s a spreadsheet I whipped up that shows five different songs during the 28-day period right before they triggered Discover Weekly.

(I think you can click the image to see a full-size version. And if not, here’s a link right to the spreadsheet.)

And here’s what the Discover Weekly spike for each song ended up looking like on the following Monday. (Warning: Big image incoming.)

(Again, I think you can click the image to make it bigger. But if you’re having trouble seeing it, here’s a link to the hosted file.)

Each song up there has its own story. The fourth song, for example, is one of Tom’s, and it had been out for about a year before we started promoting it with Meta ads. The fifth song was in the middle of both an ads campaign and a playlisting campaign. And so on.

But specifics aside, I think it’s pretty clear that once you cross 7,000 streams in a 28-day period with a 10% or higher save rate, Discover Weekly is right around the corner.

Which may beg the question:

Okay, so how do you get those streaming numbers?

If you’re starting from the backwaters of Spotify with only a couple of streams to your name, 7,000 streams in a month might seem like quite the mountain to climb.

But for most artists, it’s very doable – if you have time or money to spend on promotion.

Each of the five songs I’ve referenced was in the middle of an active Meta ads campaign when it triggered Discover Weekly. So Meta advertising is clearly an option to make the climb.

But then again, I run a Meta ads agency, so I’m drawing my examples from a rigged bag. Outside of Meta ads, there are plenty of other ways to drive streams:

1. Playlisting
2. Social media
3. Collaborations
4. Other stuff (touring, billboards, sync, grapes, etc.)

There’s not one right source of streams. If you want to reach Discover Weekly, you just need to find some combination of tactics that gets you to the threshold.

That’s a bit of a cop out, I guess. But hey, I’m running out of caffeine and this email can only be so long.

And on that note…

That’s all I’ve got for today.

Hopefully this breakdown was helpful. And whether you care one whit about hitting Discover Weekly or not, here’s hoping you keep making meaningful music.