While most people use Spotify as a way to listen to, discover, and consume music, you can leverage it to strengthen your brand as a DJ and to engage with your fans (and potential fans) in ways that stretch far beyond the “Download my new mixtape!” route thanks to its social and playlist making features.
Here are five ways to use Spotify playlists as a DJ brand builder.
Five ways to use Spotify playlists
1. Use Spotify playlists to showcase your musical taste and knowledge
Making Spotify playlists is a great way to share music that you wouldn’t normally play at a gig. If you’re known for being a house or EDM DJ, for example, creating playlists for different kinds of music that you like to listen to (but don’t DJ normally) is a great way to tell your fans about your broader taste in music.
It’s a win-win situation because you get to expose a side of you that usually isn’t on show at your gigs, and your fans get to hear different music aside from what you normally push.
2. Create a weekly or monthly Top 10 playlist
Remember when making mixtapes and burned CDs of the latest tunes were all the rage? Since no one’s got a tape deck anymore, and CD players are losing out to mobile devices like smartphones, the next logical step is to transition these mixtapes onto digital playlists.
Create and curate a Spotify playlist dedicated solely to your favourite new tracks. You can update it as often as you want, but the key here is to be consistent. The idea is to corral your top new songs and have them all in one place that you look after regularly. Not only is it easier than making a mixtape, so there’s a bigger chance that you’ll find time to do it week after week, but it’s easier for your fans to trust you to bring them the freshest tunes if you do it on the regular.
3. Curate your own themed, fun playlists
Apart from making genre playlists, of which there are a ton already on Spotify, get more personal by crafting lists based on everyday challenges like moods (good, bad, iffy), activities (driving to work, going to bed, trying to get out of bed), and real life events (holidays, birthdays, summer / winter seasons).
Curating a playlist filled with music you love listening to while you work in your pyjamas connects you with other folk who work from home, or listening to music that helps calm you down during your daily struggle doing business chores puts in you touch with other listeners who need to chill out.
These types of human connection-based playlists help your followers peel back another layer of your professional image and get to know you on a more personal level, not just another guy behind the decks.
4. Embed playlists on your website
Creating all these Spotify lists and sharing them on your social media accounts are important, but perhaps most important of all is that they should be found natively on your own DJ homepage. In a way, making playlists is a form of content creation through curation, and having them on a webpage not only promotes the playlists themselves, but shows people who visit your site that you’re actively involved in other music communities whether they’re connected to you on those social media outlets or not.
If you’re not posting your Top 10 or your themed playlists on your website, you’re losing out on a great opportunity to add very relevant content that strengthens you as a DJ and music enthusiast further.
5. Engage with others in the Spotify community
Finally, what makes Spotify different from a normal music streaming service is that it’s built on a community platform with social aspects built in. While you can listen to tunes and figuratively “live on an island” here, using Spotify to the fullest means engaging with others in the community who share your interests.
You can do just that by following artists and other playlists that you love, sharing relevant tunes to your network, and even sharing native content outside of them (eg Facebook / Twitter) to create a greater reach for your DJ brand.
Finally…
While it’s tempting to add dozens of tunes to playlists in one sitting and to follow people willy nilly, remember that the most effective social media strategy is to have an engaged audience, whether that’s 10 people or 10,000. The goal here isn’t to just have a massive following, but, more importantly, a meaningful one that resonates with you and what you’re about as a DJ.
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Got any other tips on how DJs can use Spotify for branding purposes? What’s your one biggest piece of advice for growing a following on Spotify? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Joey Santos
