Every artist eventually gets the same two pitches in their DMs: someone selling playlist placement, and someone selling streams. They are usually presented as alternatives. They are not. They do different jobs, one of them is frequently a scam, and the honest answer is that most artists should use both at different moments.
What a playlist actually gives you
A placement on a playlist with real listeners gives you new people. That is the whole point. Someone who has never heard of you hears the song in a context they trust, and a fraction of them save it, follow you, or go looking for the rest of your catalogue.
That fraction is small. A 50,000-follower playlist does not give you 50,000 listeners; it gives you however many of those followers actually play the list that week, and then a percentage of a percentage. But those people are real and some of them stay.
What paid plays actually give you
Paid plays give you a number. Not new fans, a number.
That sounds dismissive and it is not meant to be, because the number does real work. It moves you past the threshold where a platform has no data about your song. It makes your profile look like somebody's career rather than an experiment. It gives an A&R or a booker something to react to.
What it does not do is create listeners who care. Nobody who hears your song as part of a bought play becomes a fan, because in the meaningful sense nobody heard it.
So which problem do you have?
Most new releases have the second problem first and the first problem second. A song with 80 plays does not get playlisted, does not get shared, and does not get taken seriously, because everything downstream reads the same emptiness. Fixing that is what a small paid campaign is for.
Then you pitch.
The playlist offers to walk away from
Playlist pitching has a large, well-organised scam economy around it. The tells:
What we sell, and what we do not
Nitro sells plays, saves, followers and monthly listeners. We do not sell playlist placement and we would not, because the version of it that can be sold at scale is the version that does not work.
We also cannot get you on Spotify's editorial playlists. Nobody can sell that. It is pitched through Spotify for Artists, for free, and the pitch is judged by humans and by how the song is already performing: which, circling back, is a reason to have numbers before you pitch.
The sequence that makes sense
- Release. Get the song live everywhere.
- Small paid campaign. Enough that the song does not look abandoned. On Audiomack this costs a few thousand naira.
- Pitch. Spotify for Artists, user playlist curators, DJs, blogs. Now you have something to point at.
- Spend on what responds. If a playlist lands and the saves jump, put money behind that platform. If nothing moves, you have learned something about the song.
Doing step 3 before step 2 is why most pitches get ignored. Doing step 2 and skipping step 3 is why most paid campaigns produce a number and nothing else.
The uncomfortable summary
Paid plays are a floor, not a ceiling. They stop your song looking dead. They cannot make it alive. Playlists and TikTok and the people who actually share music do that, and they do it more readily for a song that already has a pulse.
Spend a little to get the pulse. Spend your real effort on the rest.