Spotify for Artists: how to claim your profile, pitch editorial playlists and what to check weekly

Spotify for Artists is the free dashboard where an artist or their team controls the Spotify profile, reads the stats and pitches songs to the editors before they come out. It is not a promotion tool: it does not deliver streams and it does not guarantee playlists. The numbers below come from the official Spotify for Artists help, checked in November 2026.

What Spotify for Artists is and what it is not

It is free and access is shared with the team (manager, label, distributor). The paid tools, Marquee and Showcase, are a different thing: ads inside Spotify, with their own budget.

What it does not do: upload music (that is the distributor's job), place songs on playlists because you filled out a form, or show who each listener is. If someone sells you the access or a "guaranteed pitch", read how to evaluate a Spotify promotion service first.

How to claim your profile

The process, according to the official help:

• Go to artists.spotify.com and request access to the profile. Spotify asks for a link to your website or socials to verify your identity.
• The review is manual and can take a few days. Only one request can be pending per profile.
• If your distributor is one of Spotify's preferred providers, access arrives when you submit the request. If another team already claimed the profile, its admin has to invite you.
• If your music is not on Spotify yet, ask your distributor for the artist link and contact support with that link and the release UPC. If you do not have the code, look it up by UPC or ISRC and check the profile with the Spotify ID finder.

What to fill out before asking for anything

An empty profile weakens the pitch and any ad. The minimum, with the requirements from the official help:

• Bio: up to 1,500 characters, with @ to link artists, albums, playlists and tracks. Genre, city and real collaborations, the same everywhere.
• Images: avatar at least 750 x 750 px and header at least 2,660 x 1,140 px, as JPEG, PNG or GIF up to 20 MB, with no text or advertising.
• Artist Pick: what sits at the top of the profile (a song, album, video, playlist, concert or merch). It stays live for 180 days unless you change it; refresh it with every release.
• Canvas: a vertical loop of 3 to 8 seconds, 9:16, between 720 and 1,080 px tall, as MP4 or JPG. It replaces the cover art while the song plays.

Editorial pitching: one song, ahead of time

You pitch from Music › Upcoming, with the song already delivered by the distributor and not yet out. Submit it at least 7 days before release: that puts it in your followers' Release Radar and gives the editors time to listen. Only one song pitch is active at a time, compilations and songs where you are the featured artist do not qualify, and Spotify says it plainly: pitching does not guarantee placement.

What to write: real genre and subgenre, language, instruments, mood, where you are from and the story behind the song. Specific beats salesy. What to expect from playlists: what is realistic in playlist pitching in 2026.

What to check every week

Stats update once a day, around 5 PM Eastern (9 PM UTC); new releases get a live stream count for the first 7 days, and a stream counts after 30 seconds. Four things every week:

• Listeners versus streams. Listeners are unique people in the period; streams are plays. If streams rise and listeners do not, the same people are listening; if both rise, you are reaching new people.
• Source of streams. Spotify separates active sources (your profile and catalog, the listener's library and playlists, the queue) from programmed ones (editorial playlists, personalized ones such as Discover Weekly and Radio, other listeners' playlists). Active is your own audience; programmed depends on editors and the algorithm, and it can go away.
• Saves. A song added to the listener's library: the cheapest signal that they want to hear it again.
• Playlists. Music › Playlists shows the 100 playlists with the most listeners of your music over the last 12 months (at least 3 listeners each). Check which came in this week and which actually bring listeners.

Marquee and Showcase: the part that is paid

They are the ads inside Spotify, in the Campaigns tab: Marquee, a full-screen recommendation of a new release; Showcase, a banner on Home and Browse. You are charged per click, the minimum budget is 100 USD, you need at least 1,000 streams in the last 28 days in the chosen market (for Marquee, also 5,000 monthly listeners there) and they can only be bought with billing in certain countries, among them the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

They push the song to people who already listen to you or resemble them; they do not build an audience from zero. In our music marketing packages they come after the groundwork: a complete profile, a pitch on time and content outside Spotify.

This week

In this order:

• Claim the profile (or check who manages it) and make sure only one exists with your name; if there are two, the distributor fixes it.
• Fill out the bio, avatar, header, Artist Pick and the Canvas of the song you are pushing.
• If you have a release, confirm with your distributor that it is delivered and pitch with more than 7 days to spare.
• Write down listeners, streams, saves and sources every Monday: the trend matters more than the number.
• Keep your UPC and ISRC codes and your artist ID: support, curators and any agency will ask for them. Here is what they are.