My Results from Spotify's Discovery Mode

I just got Discovery mode available today? Should I literally use it for all my songs? Currently Spotify offered me 15 and a couple of them are odd choices tbh

I loved when they removed my bands songs from Discover Weekly, we usually had around 5 songs per month organically in the DW for YEARS. This plummeted our monthly listeners and then the email comes saying we now have to pay for it... gross. This new paid for model is awful, it feels like the algorithm forgot all the info it gathered over many years and just started again not targeting the right people. I think this because followers, saves and playlist adds are not even close to matching the organic DW we had. It is so disheartening.

This is my third month using DM but from the very first day I can see a huge rise in radio traffic and ALL my algorithmic streams. No only that, I have as much or a little bit more traffic to my Spotify page than I get from running $30 a day ads
I'm very satisfied with these results but Spotify has told me there's a couple songs that got more algorithmic streams without DM so I just remove them from my DM campaigns

I think seeing that your results have been similar to mine reinforces my feeling that Spotify offered this due to the income split on their end. I had a great three months where I went from 20 radioplay listeners a day (average) to 30/40 the following month and then anywhere between 40-100 which incredibly exciting. I mentioned this in a pitch for my next single and suddenly radioplay dropped off entirely, but the next month Spotify offered me Discovery Mode which was great for about 7 days before it became redundant again.

What’s dangerously important to add here is that Discovery Mode is strictly based off a Song’s URI. I see Tom, you’ve been doing a bunch of waterfall releases. Each of those releases have its own URI, which mean each of those songs has its own respective popularity score. For example. Your song “Shade” has FIVE different URIs, which means five different popularity scores. I see from the video you chose the songs from the full Light.Dark album which is the more recent URIs. That’s probably why you aren’t seeing bigger results. You’d have to choose the URIs of the songs that has generated a higher popularity score to see maximum results, which may be from the past releases. I hope this made sense.

The thing most people misunderstand with Discover Mode is that your song(s) still need to perform well when added to radio, that means:
- Not skipped
- Added to playlists / saved often
- Listener starts to follow the artist

If your song is not good enough / hits the right audience in the radio it will be exposed less often and maybe even back to status quo.

Before DM I used to get 300-500 streams daily from radio. Out of the blue that got cut to 20-40 daily. A few months ago I heard of DM and joined in early beta and my streams bumped up. 2 months ago it drop back down to like 170 daily ain't bad but now they're cutting 30%...so I don't know.. Plus no algo plays at all anymore. Everything just slowed down

Thanks 🙂🔥🙏

280,000 monthly listeners here, Discovery Mode for 8 months and my experience is quite mixed... When I started, the overall streams definitely went up. I was happy but in the end, they just got back to where they were a few months before my Radio got killed without a clear explanation (probably when they started testing Discovery Mode). After this peak (x4 Radio streams) my Radio streams have been slowly declining despite constantly adding new releases to DM. Nowadays I think that it might be a bit too late to see a real value with DM, as more and more people have access to it. Spotify can't 'create' streams. If you add streams somewhere, you remove streams elsewhere. In the end the only winner will be Spotify because they pay the same amount of streams at a lower rate, and we, artists won't see any difference in our numbers. And even if some will win, others will lose, mathematically.

Uhh, this is like those hidden price cuts in the supermarket, where the price stays the same but you get less of the goods. 30% is not a small cut!! Let's hope there is a long tail to it..

How many followers did you add? Also, glad to see your channel continuing to grow. Love your content.

dont opt in now for next month and see that u wont get anymore regular algorithmic streams

the whole thing is a scam. when i opted in i never got any natural algorithmic streams on the songs i didnt opt in. its just a payola scam.

honestly, I think the problem is your songs. I've seen excellent results.

If Spotify aren’t increasing the total number of algorithmic streams that can ‘go round’ - and there’s nothing to suggest they are - then eventually everyone will have to use Discovery mode but won’t be getting any additional streams, with Spotify simply skimming an extra 30% off the top. They’ll definitely expand this to Release Radar and Discover Weekly too.

I release every friday , and 3rd month with Discovery Mode and 1000 plays aprox on radio mode daily. I have 560 tracks on spotify :D the more it gets similar fans, the bigger it gets, at least for me :)

I would say Spotify is one of the worst platforms I have ever run paid promotion on. The stats rarely make sense.

I get 1000 radio plays a week, but you get 1k in one month, where's the catch? I only have 4k monthlies.