When starting off as an indie artist this might be the first thing you try out as a way to get streams and get new listeners to discover your awesome music. 

Given that you have reached an good enough quality of your published music and that you find playlists in your genre, this would give you instant result in the form of new streams. 

However, the nature of playlists is more of non active listeners. Maybe the playlist is used in the background in a party, at a restaurant or simular. So the rate of listeners actively listening to the playlist and save songs, follow artists will be low. This means that when your track is taken off the playlists, your listeners and streams will drop back to where it was before the campaign. 

Is submitting to playlists pointless? Absolutely not. While it might not bring a flood of new fans, it can lead to discovery through algorithmic playlists. However, it’s crucial to submit to relevant playlists. If your pop songs end up on a heavy metal playlist, it could mislead Spotify’s algorithms, resulting in recommendations of unrelated artists.

If you see that Spotify suggest similar artists that you don’t think is related in anyway with your music, then you might have fed the algorithms with bad data. For instance maybe playlists in a genre you don’t belong to and with artist that is not similar to you at all. In this case you have really confused the algorithms and Spotify try to suggest your music in the wrong context and probably this will not get anyone to discover your music.

Giving the algorithms good quality data is the way to ensure that you actually can benefit from the algorithmic playlists. Then your music gets played together with similar artists as you and chances that a new fan will pick up your music is a lot more probable.

If you for some reason have got your data mixed up through unrelated streams, don’t worry this can be corrected by consistently providing the algorithms with accurate data.