I’ve noticed a new trend where a vast majority of independent playlist creators are charging money for them to review and put songs on their playlists. I’ve been purposely asking about submissions from several of these creators to see their responses and a vast majority are versions of this (below). I wanted to know if this is against Spotify policy for these creators to profit off of Spotify’s brand, or if its just a terrible unethical thing to do that we cannot do anything about. This particular playlist creator is “Joe Vuong” and he curates “Acoustic Lounge - Chillout & Easy Listening” which has almost 400,000 followers. I’ve received similar messages from dozens of creators that are profiting off of Spotify’s success.

Any information would be greatly appreciated!

"I get hundreds of requests to consider songs for my playlists. So I have had to develop a submission system whereby you can get a priority review of your songs. I'm only charging $20 USD PER SONG to dedicate my time to reviewing it. You can PayPal the money to Joeme@me.com. Please note. I will definitely listen to it but it doesn't guarantee that it will get added to the playlist. Takes about 2 weeks for me to decide. Once the money has been paid I'll send you a link to submit the songs."

I’m in a band and we embraced Spotify early on and were lucky enough to have some of our music chosen to be put on some very popular playlists like Mood Booster quite a few times and it did wonders for our career. We even got several big TV and FILM placements because music supervisors and producers heard our music on your playlists.

Over the past year, I’ve been finding (as are many artists) that its becoming darn-near impossible to get on any major playlists as an indie band. I’ve noticed Spotify set up a few “submission” pages but probably due to the infinite number of submissions, nothing ever comes of it. We even had a song chart on US iTunes all the way to #22 and yet it couldn’t get any notice on Spotify playlists.