Recent updates

Playlist syncing was one of my big projects for 2024, and it's finally here. Curators can now "sync" their playlists so that when their Spotify playlist updates, it automatically flows through to their other playlists.

Right now we're able to sync Spotify playlists to four platforms:

• YouTube / YouTube Music (you can create an account for free)
• SoundCloud (also free)
• Apple Music (premium subscription required)
• Deezer (premium subscription, but some regions are still free)

At the very least we recommend curators get set up on YouTube and SoundCloud. It's completely free, and once it's running it shouldn't require much attention.

Connecting your playlists (for curators)

To activate playlist syncing, follow these steps:

• Visit your curator profile and navigate to the tab of your preferred streaming partner and connect your account
• Look for the "Import playlist" button to copy your playlist from Spotify
• Once copied, you can "sync" your playlist
• If there are any errors finding a matching song, you'll see a little note pop up that can be clicked to learn more

How it works

Your playlists will automatically sync whenever you share a song via SubmitHub. It's that simple!

We'll also try to make sure that when you approve a song, each of your synced platforms gets included in the "where they'll share" section. In the screenshot below, all that needs to be done is selecting the playlist - we'll take care of communicating each platform with the artist.

There are a few other times your playlists might sync:

• If you've scheduled a song to be automatically removed using our Spotify integration, we'll make sure it gets removed from your other playlists
• If you visit your profile page you can manually initiate a sync for any of your playlists

For YouTube, Deezer and SoundCloud we're able to keep songs listed in the same order as your Spotify playlist. Apple is a bit different, which I'll address in the section below.

Limitations

Apple: these guys in particular seems to have a pretty bad API. There are a few regular issues we're encountering:

1. You cannot change the order of songs in an Apple playlist unless you open up the app
2. Old songs cannot be removed unless you open up the app
3. New songs get added to the *end*
4. Their authentication seems to regularly disconnect 😡

I can't solve #1 - #3 - it's the way their API is designed - but I hope that I can get #4 to behave a bit better.

SoundCloud: there are typically a lot of songs missing - somewhere between 10% and 30% is common.

Impact on your engagement score

Earning the "shares cross-platform" badge will boost your engagement score and make you a more desirable outlet to send to.

Here's how you can do it:

• Consistently share 90% of your songs to 3+ platforms, including Spotify
• These platforms do not have to be playlists. You can also earn this badge by sharing to various social media accounts, for example

Yeah, it's that straightforward!

A few notes:

• As mentioned earlier, YouTube and SoundCloud are completely free to sign up and use, so there's nothing to lose by connecting these and syncing them
• This is what the badge looks like
• When submitting, we now give artists the option to filter by curators who share across multiple platforms. You'll want to make sure your profile shows up when they do this :)

Future development

I've got a few improvements to make:

• Easily view all the tracks in a playlist
• Notify artists when we can't find their song on a platform so that it can be synced going forward
• Let curators know that their Apple playlist has grown huge and it's time to clean it up

I'm hoping to add Amazon Music and Tidal in the near future, but neither platform has an available API endpoint to manage playlists.

Let me know if you've identified any bugs or have any feature requests!