If you Google "Spotify playlist promotion" you'll get two entirely separate offerings, worded almost identically. Both talk about playlists. Both talk about real listeners. Both show screenshots of stream graphs going up. One of them is a submission and one of them is a purchase, and the difference determines what you get, what it costs, and whether it endangers your release.
Three things, not two
Before we compare the two, there's a third that also appears in the same search results and shouldn't be lumped together with them.
Editorial pitching is free. It's a pitch to Spotify's own staff via Spotify for Artists. No one sells it, no one can sell it, and no one can charge money for it. If someone is selling editorial pitching to you as a paid service, that tells you everything you need to know about that service provider.
The two other things — the two this article is about — are both about independent playlists, the ones not owned by Spotify, the ones owned by people and companies. They're pitching and paid placement. They're two of the five things offered under the umbrella of Spotify promotion, but they're the two most often confused.
What pitching actually buys
You send your track to independent playlist curators. They listen. They say yes or no.
What you pay for: the listen and the answer. Not the result.
How much it costs. Self-service is cheap. SubmitHub charges approximately $0.79–$0.98 per credit; most submissions cost 1–3 credits, so submitting to 30–80 curators costs roughly $30–$120. Groover charges about €2 per curator and guarantees a written response within 7 days or refunds the contact. Agency services do all the work for you and charge for their time; Playlist Push campaigns start at around $250–$450, and our own plans range from $89–$269 depending on how many curators your track reaches.
What you get: some placements, some rejections, and — on platforms and services where it's required — written feedback for both.
The thing nobody values enough: the rejections. 40 curators saying no, along with why, is an actual read on whether your track has legs, and there is no other way to get that data. If you treat those rejections as useless, you've thrown away the most useful half of what you paid for.
The risk: you may reach 60 curators and get two placements on small playlists. That is an actual result. It isn't a scam — it's what you get when you pay for consideration.
What paid placement actually buys
You pay the playlist owner. The fee covers a period of time during which your song will be on the playlist. You're not waiting around for a decision, because the decision was the transaction.
What you pay for: the slot.
What you pay: typically anywhere from $50 to $1,000+ per playlist, depending on how many followers the playlist has and how active those followers are. Our own featured placements are $55–$95 per list.
What you get: what you were promised, when you were promised it. That's the appeal, and it's a real one. In a release-week scenario with a hard deadline, certainty is worth something a maybe isn't.
What you don't get: data. No one selected you. Nothing is known. When the time period elapses, the song is removed and you are back where you started, minus the money you spent, plus whatever the placement produced while it ran.
And here is the rub: Spotify's terms prohibit any service from guaranteeing paid playlist placement. This is not a loophole in the terms. It is not that every instance of paid placement will ruin your career — but any vendor telling you paid placement is fully compliant is telling you something Spotify's own documentation contradicts.
The comparison, side by side
| Pitching | Paid placement | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | Consideration | The slot |
| Outcome | Uncertain | Guaranteed |
| Typical cost | $30–$300 self-serve, $89–$500 managed | $50–$1,000+ per list |
| Timeline | 5–14 days | Immediate to a few days |
| You learn something | Yes — the rejections | No |
| Curator chose you | Yes | No |
| Spotify policy | Consistent with it | Contradicted by it |
| Best for | Testing a track, building relationships | Hitting a fixed deadline |
The return on investment
The math people use is that pitching cost $159 and resulted in six placements, so $26 per placement, whereas a paid placement cost $65. That math supports paid placements. It's the wrong math.
With a pitched placement, a curator has picked your song for their playlist. They keep it there as long as it performs, and the playlist's followers trust them to pick that way. With a paid placement, the song is removed once the time period is up, whether or not there was any engagement.
So the metric to measure isn't cost per placement. It's how things stand thirty days after the placement ends. Sometimes it's a curator who now knows your name and accepts your follow-up single. Sometimes it's nothing at all, on either side of the deal.
When to use which
Use pitching if the song is brand new and untested with any listeners beyond your inner circle, and you want to see how it resonates before investing further. Use pitching if you're looking for genuine relationships, not just campaign traffic.
Use placement if you have a specific release date, you've already validated the song's appeal, and you need high visibility within a certain time frame — a press cycle, a tour announcement, an A&R meeting. Use placement only if you understand the policy issue described above.
Use neither if there's no save rate to leverage. Both services magnify the impact a song already has on listeners. If nobody saves your song, both will generate numbers and no lasting result.
How we operate
Both services are offered by us. Pitch prices range from $89–$269 across our own pitching tiers. Placement prices range from $55–$95 per playlist.
We'd rather sell you the pitching, not because it's morally superior, but because it's the product we can describe honestly from end to end. We can tell you how many curators, how long it takes, and what feedback they gave. We can also confirm the placements came from curators who chose the track.
With placement, all we can guarantee is the placement itself and the duration it stays up — which brings us back to the note above about Spotify's terms. Be cautious if a service sells both and conflates them, or if it offers placement while implying the decision was made by curators. That's the specific thing to watch for in this industry.
Both products are perfectly acceptable to offer and to buy. It's the conflation of the two that isn't.
FAQ
Is paid placement illegal?
No. It's a business arrangement between you and a playlist curator. The issue is Spotify's terms, not the law.
Will paid placement get my track taken down?
Not by itself. The realistic risks are that the playlist has a fake audience, that the streams are removed because they look artificial, or that repeated activity across a catalogue gets reported to your distributor — who will pass the charge on to you.
How do I know which one I'm being sold?
Ask yourself one question: is the curator allowed to say no? If they aren't, you're buying placement, regardless of how it's marketed. A package of ten guaranteed playlist placements is paid placement even though the wording sounds like pitching.
Do pitching platforms have curators that accept everybody?
Curators typically post their acceptance rate, so you can compare. A curator with a 90–100% acceptance rate is selling paid placement and using the pitching platform as the vehicle for it.
Should I use a pitching platform and pay for placement?
If you do both at once, you won't know which one got your track added. The sensible order is to pitch first and find out whether the track lands, then decide whether it's worth buying visibility for.
What about curators who DM me offering to add my track for $100?
That's also paid placement, but with no intermediary and no way to hold anyone accountable. If you pay anyway, check that the playlist has real monthly listeners rather than just followers, and understand there's no recourse if the track never goes up.