Spotify launches “written by” playlists and Songwriter Pages, using credits to group tracks.
For years I’ve been dreaming of a world where ANY piece of metadata could be used by listeners to explore and group songs: songwriters, producers, beatmakers, guest features, session players, guitar solos, backwards vocal reverb, out of tune banjos, key changes, lyrical themes, and so forth.
Well, Spotify has taken a big introductory step in that direction. They just announced the beta-launch of Songwriter Pages and corresponding “written by” playlists. This will make it easier to find tracks by a particular writer, help listeners dive deeper into a songwriter’s catalog, and potentially boost the profile of artists who’ve had more commercial success writing for others.
What do Songwriter Pages and “written by” playlists look like on Spotify?
What do Songwriter Pages and “written by” playlists look like on Spotify?Let’s look at artist and songwriter Emily Weisband as an example:
- THIS is her artist profile
- THIS is her Songwriter Page (showing a catalog of her songs which have been streamed hundreds of millions of times)
- And THIS is her “written by” playlist
Her own music profile has about 31k monthly listeners. That’s very respectable, but nowhere near the kind of activity she’s seeing with songs written for other artists. With Spotify’s new songwriter features, it’s likely that fans of her songwriting will come to follow her as an artist as well.
At launch time, Spotify is debuting Songwriter Pages for people Meghan Trainor, Fraser T. Smith, Missy Elliott, Teddy Geiger, Ben Billions and Justin Tranter. But there’s also an open submission form to request your own Songwriter Page.
How do you apply for a Songwriter Page on Spotify?
Just go HERE to fill out an online form.
It’s pretty easy — and by easy, I mean it’ll take you a minute to fill out. No guarantees Spotify will quickly grant your request, of course!
But you absolutely should fill out that request form if you’re a songwriter. Whether this kind of feature helps you gain 60 or 600,000 extra streams in the future, it’s the kind of thing that WILL help fans build a deeper appreciation for your work.
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.