By Vickie Maris
As you know, we have many options for audio streaming. The two that carry the most weight in the music industry are Spotify (followers, streams, playlists, listeners) and YouTube (views on videos, subscriptions to channels, thumbs up, comments). Even if you prefer listening in Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora or another service, it is much appreciated by artists in our industry when you you set up a free account on Spotify to follow artists and to listen to playlists.
Once you do that, you can support SAMI artists by streaming their songs on Spotify. You can do that with volume on or off, and in the free or paid version of the app. There are several playlists of SAMI and/or REC Room Recording artists available on the accounts of Chris June, Scott Greeson, Vickie Maris and others. A few playlist links are provided below as a starting point.
Listening on a weekly basis
If each reader of the newsletter plays a playlist of songs by SAMI artists once a week, it provides each artist in the playlist with an additional listener for the 7-day period of stats that Spotify tracks (e.g., February 5th - 11th). That's also an additional stream for each song.
Another way to support artists in the group is to create your own Spotify playlist and add your choice of SAMI-artist songs to the list. The algorithm gives extra weight to a song that is being collected into other playlists beyond the lists generated by the artist.
Follow an artist's verified artist account in Spotify
One of the most helpful steps you can take for an artist in Spotify is to click the follow button on the artist account Make sure you're following the artist account, which will have a blue checkmark by it if the artist is verified, as opposed to the Spotify user or listener account. When you follow a private profile, their listening activity will appear in the desktop client. Following the artist account will keep you notified of new releases.
Giving love to new releases
It's also very supportive when you listen to a new release on many occasions, to help it get past the 1000 streams mark. If you are aware that one of our fellow artists has released a new song, give it a spin! The easiest way to do this is to put new releases into your own playlist.
Spotify now requires that a new release generate at least 1000 streams in a 12-month period in order to generate revenue for the artist. There are other values to an artist if a song gets to at least 1000 streams; the algorithm will see that people are listening, and push that song to more people. As an artist, it's good to have the goal of reaching 1000 streams within the first year of release.