My Lazy Release Strategy: How a Playlist Keeps Growing Your Music Between Releases

Something I tell every musician I start working with is that you're going to release a lot of songs in your career. You'll release more than you think.

And at some point, probably sooner than you expect, one of those releases will go wrong.

The budget runs out before the campaign is ready. Something unexpected happens the week you planned to launch. You're dealing with something personal, or you burned out from the last release and you don't have it in you to go all in again.

Every musician I've worked with has been through some version of this. And the ones who already had a playlist running always had something working for them, even when the release itself didn't go as planned.

Why a playlist keeps working

A playlist keeps growing through wars, loss and all the other unexpected things that happen in life.

A playlist promotion campaign runs every single day. It grows your Spotify followers, sends the genre signals that get your music onto Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and builds an audience that's already there when you release something new.

You don't have to switch it on for every release. It keeps working either way.

And when you do have the budget and energy for a bigger push around a specific song, you don't need to build a whole new campaign from scratch. You raise the playlist budget for that week, and the machine you already have running does more. The foundation is already there.

What it looks like in practice

In March 2026 I started working with a musician called Kenny. When we began, he had under 100 Spotify followers. Two weeks later, he had over 600.

His playlist, Walk With A Stupid Smile, features his own music and brings him hundreds of listeners every month. It has since passed 5,000 followers, at about 6 cents per follower. You can see the numbers on my case studies page.

Now imagine what that looks like after a year, when every new song he releases has 500, then 1,000, then 5,000 people already seeing it on Release Radar.

That's the part nobody talks about when they talk about growing on Spotify. The musicians who release into a growing audience always have an easier time than the ones starting from zero with every song. And in 2026, the difference between those two situations is very often a playlist.

If you want to set this up yourself, I teach the whole system, from building the playlist to running the campaign, in Label Level Playlists. And if you'd rather have it done for you, I also build and grow the playlist for you.

A content idea to try: a trending sound with your story

Take a trending sound, add a caption with a familiar, inspiring message, and show a snippet of your life as a musician underneath it.

The popular audio, the relatable message and the behind-the-scenes look at your music journey work together. The video feels trendy and personal at the same time, and it shows your process without you having to explain it.