Become a Music Curator (for Independent Artists)

Getting paid for listening to music? Reviewing a few songs in the morning with a freshly brewed coffee and getting paid for my favorite activity — sounds lovely!

And yes, it actually works. Depending on your score and followers you can make anywhere from 50€ to 400€ per month just through reviews. You can reinvest the money in ads for your own music project or reinvest it to boost your playlists.

Create a playlist with matching songs for each of your own songs, promote it, write reviews and grow your streams and monthly listeners on the side. Two birds, one stone.

It's not that simple though. Before you can write your first reviews, you need to invest some time and energy into promoting your playlists. But more on that later.

How Do I Become a Playlist Curator?

First, think about which genres you enjoy listening to and where you already have some expertise. Deep House for example. You can either sort playlists by subgenre (e.g. Stutter House) or by mood (sad, uplifting).

Now think about the "mood": where should the playlist be listened to? At sunset, after a breakup, or while walking the dog?

Now it's time to design the first cover. Search the internet for stock footage or look through your own photo library for cool pictures from your last vacation. Sometimes authentic vibes are trendier than polished stock photos. Add captions and then create one or two playlists on Spotify.

You should also create promotional clips, meaning videos that you add captions to — we'll need those for the promo in a moment.

Building Listeners

Now we need listeners. Lots of listeners. The easiest way is Meta Ads. Create an Instagram and Facebook account, set up a Meta Ads account and test different ads. The link in the ad leads to your playlist.

The problem is that ads can be a bit costly. It took me a few months until I had the money back through song reviews.

The First Review Websites

Once we have farmed 100 followers we can sign up on the first review website: Daily Playlists. We don't get paid here, but the people who apply will follow us. We want to reach 1,000 followers as quickly as possible, because then we can finally sign up on the review sites that pay us.

You can now put the earned money in your own pocket and have loads of organic chicken breast delivered (that's what I did at the beginning) — or reinvest the money into Meta Ads to get more listeners and therefore increase your score and your earnings on the curator sites.