How to use Amazon Music’s SPOTLIGHT tool to promote your music
Want to speak directly to your listeners on Amazon Music?
Musicians with more than 3,000 fans on the platform can now post audio messages using Amazon Music for Artists’ promo feature called Spotlight.
NOTE: That might be a high threshold for some DIY musicians. But Amazon has hinted they’ll lower the 3k requirement soon. Platforms often roll out features in this fashion to make sure everything’s working 100% before they enable it for every artist and see a flood of adoption.
What is an Amazon Music Spotlight?
A Spotlight is a custom voice message. It plays in conjunction with “any song, album, playlist, or station,” similar to Pandora’s Artist Audio Messaging.
You can use Spotlight to:
- Announce tour dates
- Tell fans about a new release
- Dive into your creative process
- Give a shoutout to your collaborators
- Highlight music by your heroes
- Tease other big news, reviews, or video launches
Listeners will hear these messages by going to your artist profile on Amazon Music. They can also ask to hear Spotlights via voice-command using an Echo device. You can only feature one audio message at a time. However, you can update your Spotlight as often as you like.
Right now a Spotlight can only be heard by listeners in the US, but Amazon hopes to expand to other territories soon. Amazon Music for Artists has been introducing new features like this at a steady pace. Spotlight follows on the heels of Amazon Music’s direct playlist pitching tool. I’m sure much more is in the works.
Here’s a little video from Amazon Music to show Spotlight in action…
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.