Four marks sit on every pitch you send. PlaylistFeed pitch tracking records each one as delivered, opened, replied or added, against the release it belongs to. Open that release and the counts sit at the top. Pitches sent, replies, playlist adds.
PlaylistFeed is where you search verified playlist curators by genre, draft the message, send it and read what comes back. One account covers every song and every release. Making an account and searching the listings is free. Pitching is on the paid plan.
Search for a way to track playlist submissions and you’ll get spreadsheet templates.
A column for the playlist, a column for the curator, a date sent, then a status you update by hand. The column nobody fills in is the one that decides your next release. That column is what came back and when. Your sheet can’t see an inbox, so you carry every reply across yourself.
PlaylistFeed Pitch Tracking Starts the Moment You Send
Each mark comes from something that happened. You didn’t edit a row to make it appear, and that’s the whole difference between this and a tracker you keep yourself.
1. Delivered
Delivered means the message reached the curator’s inbox. Every address gets tested before a listing goes live, so your pitch arrives somewhere that accepts mail. A submission form tells you none of that, which is why a tested curator email beats a contact page.
2. Opened
Opened tells you the curator has seen it. It’s not an answer, and it doesn’t mean they played the song. What it rules out is the worry that your message went nowhere.
3. Replied
Replied is the answer itself, an accept or a decline. The curator writes it, and it lands in the same screen your pitch went out from. A decline still arrives as an answer, so the pitch closes rather than going quiet.
4. Added
Added is the playlist add. The curator’s list carries your song the moment they put it there. Spotify takes longer to show it in your own numbers, and sometimes it never shows it at all.
Every Pitch Is Logged Against the Release It Belongs To
Open a release and the summary sits right there. Pitches sent, replies, playlist adds, with each pitch listed underneath. Last spring’s single keeps its own numbers while the new one fills up.
A round of outreach usually runs to a few dozen messages over a fortnight. By the time the answers start arriving you’ve stopped counting, and the release page has held the count for you.
Two releases running at once stay apart on the same account. The single you put out in March keeps its own pitches and its own answers while the EP fills up beside it. You can write to the same curator about both without losing which song they said yes to.
How Long Does a Curator Have to Reply on PlaylistFeed?
A curator has seven days to answer. After that the pitch closes by itself and shows as expired. Your decision slot stays with you for the next curator, and the pitch already counted against your monthly capacity. A late answer still turns up in your order history.
Try It On the Release You Have Coming
You can look through the verified listings on PlaylistFeed without paying. The 1.4K+ curators there got checked before they reached your screen. Pick the ones that suit the release you have coming. Write to them and find curators by genre.
What Spotify for Artists Shows and What It Leaves Out
Spotify for Artists shows the result of a pitch and never the pitch itself. Go to Music then Playlists and you’ll find the playlists carrying your music. Spotify’s support pages put that tab at the top 100, ordered by how many of your listeners each playlist brought. A playlist needs three of your listeners before it shows, and the data covers the last 12 months.
Read that against a real round of outreach and the gaps show up quickly. The curator who replied and passed isn’t there. Neither is the curator who added your song to a list that sent two listeners, since two sits under the floor.
An add on a small playlist can be real, useful and invisible in that tab for months.
A reply lands in days. An add reaches your Spotify numbers only once enough people play the song from that playlist, which takes weeks.
| What you want to know | Where it shows | How long it stays |
|---|---|---|
| The pitch reached the curator | PlaylistFeed, against the release | Kept with the release |
| The curator opened it | PlaylistFeed, against the release | Kept with the release |
| The answer, accept or decline | PlaylistFeed, against the release | Kept with the release |
| The playlist add | Spotify for Artists, Music then Playlists | Published for the last 12 months |
| Listeners from that playlist | Spotify for Artists, Music then Playlists | Published for the last 12 months |
How to Read a Round Two Weeks In
Open the release page and read three things in order.
Start with replies against pitches sent, since that ratio tells you whether the list suited the song. It moves long before any add does.
Then read the declines. A curator who wrote back with a reason has told you something about the tempo, the genre or the fit. Three of those saying the same thing is worth more than ten silences.
The adds come last, and those are the ones to check in Spotify later, once the listeners come through.
Anything still sitting at delivered after seven days has closed by itself. Put those names on the next release rather than chasing them now.
Can a Spreadsheet Do the Same Job?
A spreadsheet holds the sends well enough, and our own playlist pitch tracker template runs a round if that’s what you have. Where it breaks is the return leg, since a sheet has no way of knowing an answer arrived.
You paste the reply in, or the row stays blank. Six months later the name looks cold when it isn’t.
A sheet you keep by hand records what you meant to do, which is the second problem with it. The row says sent on 14 March. Whether that mail reached anybody is a question you never asked.
Why the Answer Matters More Than the Send
A decline from a curator who listened is worth keeping. That person knows your genre now. The next single is a shorter message rather than a cold one.
Follow up timing gets simpler too, since the send date and the answer date sit on one screen.
Six months on, that’s what the record is for. You open the next release, sort by who answered last time, and start there. Running that off a spreadsheet is harder than it sounds, because the sheet went stale two rounds ago.
The reply templates worth having are short ones, and they read better with the curator’s answer sitting above them.
What PlaylistFeed Will Not Tell You
The curator decides what goes on the playlist. A pitch can be delivered, opened, read properly and still come back as a decline. No record of any kind changes that.
An answer isn’t owed to you either, which is why the seven day close exists.
A pitch to the wrong genre is still the wrong pitch, tracked or not. The verification checks behind each listing say the playlist is real and active. They do not say your song suits it, and that call stays yours.
How much any of this is worth to you depends on how often you release. An artist putting out one single a year can hold five names in a note on their phone. The record earns its keep once you’re sending 30 or 40 pitches a release, two or three times a year.
Common Mistakes
- Counting sends. Forty pitches out is not a result. Replies and adds are the two numbers on the release page worth reading, and the first one arrives long before the second.
- Waiting on Spotify. The Playlists tab needs three of your listeners on a playlist before it lists it, so a genuine add can sit invisible while you decide the round failed.
- Letting a decline go. A curator who wrote back is a warmer name than any new listing in your genre, and most artists never write to them again.
- Rebuilding the list every release. The names, the answers and the dates already sit against the last release, which is where the next round starts.
Conclusion
PlaylistFeed pitch tracking exists because the useful half of outreach is the half that comes back. Delivered, opened, replied, added, all four sitting against the release rather than in your memory.
Spotify for Artists answers a different question, and it’s worth reading every week. It tells you which playlists carry the song now, once three of your listeners have played it from there.
Before the next release, read what the last one produced. The answers you already have are the shortest route into the next round of pitches.
Next Step
Spotify for Artists lists the playlists carrying your last song, once three of your listeners have played it from there. That leaves the curators who read your pitch and passed, plus every name you still have to find for the next release.
Finding them, writing to each one and reading the answers is the work before release day.
On PlaylistFeed you search verified curators by genre, send the pitch and see who answered.
