If your music is in fake playlists, Spotify can delete your song from their platform. It’s very unlikely that you will grow your fanbase as fake lists have bots that play your song over and over and as a result prevent the song from reaching real, algorithmic Spotify playlists such as Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. Artists using Spotify would like to know this information, so don’t miss out on your chance to get more views. Buy youtube views and start getting more attention on your channel instantly.
Let’s take a look at how you can distinguish a fake, botted playlist.
Fake Spotify Playlist Alert!
How do curators with botted/fake playlists work?
Fake playlists don’t have real people listening to the music, it’s just bots playing the playlist over and over regardless of whether the song is famous or not. For this reason, fake playlists have mostly unknown songs (usually paid to be placed by the artist).
Underneath, you can see an example of a fake playlist.
This playlist solely contains unknown songs. Besides that, the list has 145 followers but it still gives a lot of streams to the songs.
How do you know if a playlist is fake?
There’s a few simple steps you can follow to decide by yourself if a playlist is real or not:
Analyzing the curation & listener behavior
Fake playlist curators often have their bots setup in USA based cities and other big cities like London, Paris, Frankfurt. It’s not directly the case if an artist in a playlist has listeners from predominantly USA cities that it’s fake, but it’s an extra indicator to be suspicious.
Below you can see on top an example from legit streams. The cities are pretty much from all over the world. Below that, you see an example from an artist that has his song in fake playlists.
Fake listeners/Real Listeners
This information can be found on an artists ‘about’ page and shows where the majority of his/her listeners come from. If a music promotion company offers you Spotify streams that are coming from one specific country, you pretty much directly know that the company is using bots.
This is another example of a fake playlist.
Fake Playlist Spotify
If we click on the first song in the playlist, we can see other playlists in which the song is added to, where the listeners come from and how well known the artist is.
Below is a print screen of the playlists this song is added to. All these lists have few followers, and all are filled with unknown songs, which is also cause for suspicion. This gives us reason to assume that this list is fake.
Fake Playlists Spotify
But let’s confirm our suspicion. How does a list with only 146 followers bring so many streams!? Now let’s see where people are listening from:
Fake Listeners
Again, a lot of cities in the USA. Of course this doesn’t immediately shout ‘FAKE’, but let’s go a bit more in depth. We understand that artists will be popular in certain places, but this artist has 32.500 monthly listeners, and 18.723 of them are from Phoenix, US. It’s suspicious that such a large percentage (almost 60%) of the artists total listeners are from a place that the artist is not.
Another step to check this could be to analyze the growth of a playlist. The list above only has 146 followers, so it is harder to analyze the follower growth of this one, but an example is given below.
Analyzing the growth of a Spotify Playlist
There are several sites that show you the growth of a playlist, and www.spotontrack.com is a good example of a site that can do this. Underneath you can see the difference between a real playlist ‘s growth versus a botted playlist.
Real playlists usually show stable growth.
Real Spotify Playlist Growth
Fake playlists often show sharp inclines and declines, as you can see in the example underneath.
Fake Spotify Playlist Growth
Avoid the Fakes!
We really hope that this helps you to analyze playlists. Fake playlists will harm your standing with the Spotify algorithm; it looks unprofessional and Spotify can even go as far as taking your song off of their platform.
