Most artists focus all their energy on one goal : landing an editorial placement. A Spotify playlist, an Apple Music feature, a Deezer highlight. These placements are visible, flattering, and can generate thousands of streams in just a few days.
That’s a legitimate step in a release strategy. But stopping there means ignoring visibility levers that work for you over the long term — and that you can activate yourself.
An editorial placement is a decision that is entirely out of your hands. You can pitch, submit, optimise — but you don’t control the outcome. And beyond the pitch, the levers available to you are very limited. Selection depends on the team in place, the platform’s priorities at that moment, the volume of releases that week.
As a result, many artists organise everything around a release date while hoping for a placement, without having built any visibility that actually belongs to them. When the placement doesn’t come, or stops, they’re back to zero. It’s a fragile strategy — not because editorial has no value, but because it cannot be the only pillar.
Music SEO refers to all the practices that help you appear in search results : on Spotify, on Google, on YouTube, and increasingly in the responses generated by artificial intelligence tools.
On Spotify, the search bar is used by millions of listeners every day. They search for artists, genres, moods, track titles. How you are described, categorised, and associated with other artists directly influences your chances of appearing in those results. Your bio, your metadata, the words used to present you across the web — all of this is indexed.
On Google, your artist profile, your press coverage, the interviews you’ve given, the blogs that mention you — all of this forms your textual footprint online. And that footprint is what search engines read to understand who you are.
In 2026, one question is becoming increasingly common : “ChatGPT, recommend me an artist who sounds like X.” Or : “Which independent soul artists should I follow right now?” These questions, asked to tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity (an AI-powered search engine that generates answers directly from the web, citing its sources), are becoming a real music discovery channel.
These tools don’t recommend what they listen to. They recommend what they’ve read. Their answers are built from data available online : press articles, interviews, platform descriptions, Wikipedia pages, specialist blogs, transcribed podcasts.
If you don’t exist in text form on the internet, you don’t exist for AI. It’s that simple. An artist with a strong editorial presence online — articles that describe them precisely, compare them to other references, situate their universe — has a real chance of appearing in generated responses. An artist invisible on the web, however talented, never will.
The good news : this kind of visibility is something you can build yourself. Here are the key levers :
Everything above rests on one prerequisite : knowing exactly who you are as an artist, and being able to express it clearly. If you can’t describe your project in one sentence, no algorithm or AI will do it for you.
That’s the foundational work I offer in my workshop “Create an artist brand people remember” : laying the foundations of your artistic identity so that every action, every piece of content, every metadata field tells the same coherent story
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