Dreamy is an ambient playlist I’ve had on Pandora for a few years, created as a “program” in Pandora AMP. It did OK for a while, but then I neglected it. Sometimes playlists grow up and move out on their own, but others need guidance and help.
Lately, I’ve been going through my Pandora AMP programs and doing a bit of revitalizing of playlists to see if changing track listings, titles, images, and metadata helps. I’ve also done some deleting of experiments that went nowhere.
Today, the playlist is called Dreamy Ambient (concentration instrumentals). I lowered the track count to 49 and under 3 hours. Shifted a few tracks around. I rewrote the description and almost all of the search strings.
While I’ve created a lot of playlists over the years, and distributed them to as many streaming services as possible, most playlists I make die on the vine. You can’t tend to them all.
For a recording artist starting out with playlisting their own music, my advice would be to keep it simple. Unless you release a lot of music in multiple genres, there’s probably no reason to have more than 10 or 20 public playlists on services like Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music.
Craft your Pandora playlists in AMP as a “program” because you have a lot more options and data than merely transferring a Spotify playlist over to your Pandora account.
I’ve said it many times, but limit new playlists to about 60 to 90 minutes of music. No more than 20 tracks. Have some playlists be your own music, and have others with music interspersed with others. Be mindful of your title, graphics, and description keywords. I can’t write it for you. Use sentences. Cut out all the adjectives. Don’t rely on parlor tricks like ChatGPT because “AI” is a scam and writes obvious garbage.
Plug them in your emails and maybe on throttled social media outlets. Then set a calendar reminder for a month or two in the future. Look at how the playlists have performed.
If you release new music, frontload it to the playlist, and maybe remove something at the end, or a long track. Keep plugging. Rinse and repeat.
And because a lot of people are on Spotify, here is one I made from 2021 that has a Like and continues to get occasional listens, although I would rarely make a playlist this lengthy today.