Indie music stream teams hurt more than they help
As an independent musician, it can be tempting to join stream teams to grow your plays and make some easy revenue. For those that don’t know, stream teams are when someone puts a bunch of indie artists on a playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music and they all stream it often to drive up their plays. However, it's important to understand that participating in these teams can do more harm than good. Here’s some reasons why this can be harmful and some ways that might be a better approach to getting plays.
The first issue is the streaming platforms recognize that plays from stream teams are just vanity plays and not people genuinely enjoying the music. People who are actively listening to music as a fan have a pattern that will be much different from a user who streams the same few playlists while they sleep or on through the day without any deviation. While your play counts do increase, you aren’t reaching new listeners or gaining new fans.
Secondly, when your music is placed on playlists with other artists that are not similar to you in genre, it can hurt your discoverability. You want to appear with other acts who have similar styles because their fans are more likely to be interested in your music. When you are part of a stream team that is made up of playlists containing random indie music, you get caught in what I call the indie loop. It ends up being just indie artists listening to other indie artists. The algorithm only recommends your music to other indie artists. Your similar artists are filled with indie artists that don’t sound anything like you. That doesn’t mean they are bad, they just aren’t similar to you sonically.
The goal as an independent musician is to try to find music fans that will like your music, listen to it consistently, and hopefully share it. So what can you do? It’s a huge uphill battle without big marketing budget to run ads and damn near impossible to get noticed. BUT we can stop having a negative impact and try to improve by just 1%.
One thing we can do is make playlists on these platforms that other people might want to listen to. Create playlists that are specific to a genre, mood, style, etc. It’s also important to include artists on a playlist that are bigger than you. That doesn’t mean it has to be Beyoncé or the Beatles, but up-level it a bit to an artist that has a bigger base than yours. For instance, if someone comes to our profile and see that our fans also like The Replacements or the Drive-by Truckers, not only does that give a good indication of what we sound like, but if they are a fan of those two bands, they might listen to us.
Remember, the goal is to find people who don't know they are looking for you. They won’t come to you, meet them where they are. So instead of joining a stream team, focus on making connections with other musicians and curators in your genre, and creating playlists that are more likely to attract new fans. Do what you can to make the algorithm work in your favor and send you to ears that are going to like it.
Does this mean we can’t put together playlists featuring some of the latest and greatest indie tunes? No, definitely not. Does this mean we have to stop supporting each other by including indie artists on playlists? Absolutely not! Just don’t put all of your songs in one basket. You can absolutely create a playlists of just indie artists, just supplement it with playlists that have a theme and listen to the artists you enjoy as well.
Try to picture who your ideal listener is and create a playlist for them. I took a leap earlier this year and got off a lot of the “stream team” type playlists that I was apart of. A month or so later Paul Westerberg and the Vandoliers appeared on my fans also like page. These are 2 artists that have definitely inspired me, have a bigger audience than me and is probably accurate to our fan base.
If you want an example playlist, here is one I put together on Spotify called Modern Folk Rock. It includes our music, some of our favorite indie artists that our fans may not know, as well as some more well known artists. It’s not huge artists but people like Shovels & Rope, Nikki Lane, the Drive-by Truckers, etc. who I am definitely a fan of and consider us to be of similar genre.
The main point is work smarter not harder. Let’s beat these robots!