Promote your gigs on Spotify and send personal messages to all of your fans to make sure that all of your followers have a chance to see your shows.

Playing shows can be the best part of being an artist, but it can also be tough—driving thousands of miles, dealing with broken equipment, and forcing down truck stop food. One thing’s for sure: it’s a drag to play for no one.

That’s why we’re doubling down our efforts to let your fans know when you’re coming to town, and introducing some new tools to give you a snapshot of all your upcoming shows.

Here’s how it works.

Every other week, we send out millions of concert emails to listeners on Spotify. These messages let fans know when their favorite artists are coming to town, and give them the opportunity to buy tickets to the show.

A sample concert recommendation email.
A sample concert recommendation email.

We send these emails to three types of people:

  1. Followers: People who follow you on Spotify.
  2. Listeners: People who have played your music in the past 30 days.
  3. People we think might like you: People who listen to similar artists.

Guess what: We’ve found that these emails really work. Clickthrough rates are about five times higher than the music industry average. Not bad.

Also, your followers get special treatment. In addition to the emails, we send your upcoming concerts to the homescreen of their Spotify app. Your tour dates also show up in their concerts page, which features a list of upcoming concerts in their area. Everyone has their own personalized concerts page, based on listener behavior. (You can see your own right here.)

A sample concerts hub.
A sample concerts hub.

Introducing: Your concerts page.

To give you a snapshot of all your concerts on Spotify, we’ve added a new concerts section to Spotify for Artists. The dates are automatically pulled from four ticketing services: Ticketmaster, Songkick, AXS, and Eventbrite.

What you can do.

Here’s our best advice: focus on growing your followers. These are your core fans, the people who like you enough to manually click that little green “follow” button on your profile page. Think of them as your mailing list on Spotify: they’ll get updates about your activities before anyone else.

The same way your followers are the first to know when you release new music, you’ll be included in our concert recommendations when you’re coming to town.

The main thing to remember is that the best way to make sure your fans never miss a show is to ask them to follow you. For example, you might want to put an ask on your social media accounts every now and then, or shout it out from the stage. But only if you feel like it.

If you haven’t yet, get signed up for Spotify for Artists right here.