How to tell if a Spotify playlist is legitimate

A playlist can look good on paper and still do nothing for your song. Some playlists have bought followers and send streams from bots. Others have real followers who never press play. Both kinds show a follower count, and the follower count alone does not tell you which kind you are looking at.

Below are the two checks we run before we trust a playlist, and the other signs worth a look. You can do all of it yourself, for free, in a few minutes per playlist. As an example we use New Pop Music, a pop playlist with about 3,600 followers.

What a botted playlist can cost you

Spotify checks streams every day and removes the ones it decides are artificial. According to Spotify, it can then hold back the royalties for those streams, correct your public stream count, and in serious cases remove the song from Spotify playlists.

For flagrant cases, Spotify also charges the label or distributor a fee for each track. TuneCore and FUGA, two distributors, both describe it as €10 per track per month. Distributors can also take the music down or close the account when it happens often or at scale.

A large follower count is no protection. In its 2026 playlist fraud report, artist.tools found that the bigger the playlist, the more often it met their criteria for suspicious activity: 0.03% of playlists under 1,000 followers, 1.7% of playlists with 10,000 to 99,999 followers, and 2.8% of playlists with 100,000 to 999,999 followers.

Check 1: look the playlist up on artist.tools

artist.tools (opens in a new tab) follows more than 10 million Spotify playlists, by its own count. Paste the playlist's link into its search box and open the playlist page. A free account shows everything below.

The bot scan

At the top of the page, artist.tools gives the playlist a verdict: Likely Bot-free, Possibly Botted, Likely Botted or Undetermined. Possibly Botted means its system found warning signs that nobody has checked yet. Likely Botted means a person at artist.tools checked those signs by hand. Undetermined means there is not enough data yet.

The artist.tools page for the playlist New Pop Music, with the verdict Likely Bot-free and 3,619 followers

The verdict is a good first filter, but it is not proof either way. artist.tools says itself that a playlist without clear signs still comes with no guarantee. Look at the data under it too.

Follower growth

Open the follower chart. The line is the total number of followers, and the bars are the followers gained each day.

You want a line that climbs steadily and bars of about the same height every day. New Pop Music gains about 120 followers a day, and the bars stay close to that all week.

The artist.tools follower chart for New Pop Music: a steadily rising line and daily bars of similar height

A sharp jump followed by a flat line is the usual pattern of bought followers: a batch arrives in a few days, and nothing happens after that. A sudden drop is a warning sign too. It often means Spotify removed fake accounts that followed the playlist.

A jump is not always fake. An ad campaign or a viral share can also bring in a lot of followers in a short time. Look at what comes after it. Real interest keeps growing, and a bought batch goes flat.

Estimated listeners

Spotify does not show how many people listen to a playlist, so artist.tools estimates it. For New Pop Music, with about 3,600 followers, the estimate is between 1,200 and 3,500 listeners.

The artist.tools estimated listeners chart for New Pop Music, between 1,200 and 3,500 listeners

Treat this as a rough number. artist.tools bases 70 to 80% of the estimate on the follower growth of the last 14 days. The rest comes from how high the playlist ranks in Spotify search and from the Discovered On data below. A playlist with steady fake growth can therefore still get a reasonable estimate, so read it together with the next part.

Discovered On analysis

Every artist profile on Spotify has a Discovered On section. It lists the playlists that bring that artist the most listeners. Spotify fills it automatically, and a curator cannot add a playlist to it. Spotify does not publish exactly how it picks them.

artist.tools checks the artists on the playlist and counts how many of them show this playlist in their Discovered On.

The artist.tools Discovered On analysis for New Pop Music: 83% coverage, 63.18% listener engagement, visible on 99 artist profiles

• Discovered On Coverage is the share of the playlist's artists who show it in their Discovered On. For New Pop Music this is 83%, on 99 artist profiles.
• Listener Engagement is a score from 0 to 100 built on the same data. 70 and up is labelled Highly Engaged, 40 and up Engaged, 10 and up Slightly Engaged, and anything above 0 Barely Engaged.
• The table lists each artist with their monthly listeners, the days they have been on the playlist, and the position of the playlist in their Discovered On.

A healthy table has established artists in it, not only new profiles, and songs from all over the playlist, not only the first few positions. A playlist with many followers and almost no artists in this table does not bring listeners to the music on it.

Check 2: look at Discovered On in Spotify yourself

You can check the same thing in Spotify without any tool. It takes a few more clicks per artist.

1. Open the playlist and look at the Date added column. Pick a few big artists who have been on it for at least a few weeks. If the playlist has artists with hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners, start with those.
2. Open each artist's profile and scroll down to Discovered On.
3. Click Show all. This opens the full list, in ranked order. For a big artist it holds a few dozen playlists. artist.tools calls it the top 50.
4. Look for the playlist you are checking, and note its position.

Big artists are the better test. An artist with hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners is on a lot of playlists, and only a few dozen of them make this list. If the playlist is in it, it brings that artist more listeners than most of the other playlists they are on. The higher it ranks, the more people listen through it.

The Discovered On row on an artist's Spotify profile, with New Pop Music in first place

This is the Discovered On row of HUX, an artist with 134,488 monthly listeners at the time of writing. HUX has been on New Pop Music since 13 August 2026, and New Pop Music is first of the 26 playlists in the list.

Leave out artists who were added in the last week or two. A recent song may not have the playlist in its Discovered On yet, even when the playlist is good. But if the playlist is missing for every big artist you check who has been on it for a while, the playlist does not bring listeners, whatever its follower count says.

Other signs worth a look

These checks are quicker. None of them proves anything on its own, but two or three together are a strong signal.

• Plays against followers. Open a few smaller artists on the playlist and look at the play counts of their songs. If the playlist has 50,000 followers and songs that have been on it for weeks still have under 1,000 plays, the followers are not listening.
• Where the artists' listeners are. An artist's About section shows the cities where they have the most listeners. If almost all of a small artist's listeners are in one city that has no link to them, part of that audience is probably not real.
• How tracks are added. A new playlist starts with a batch of songs, and that is normal. An older playlist that keeps getting dozens of unrelated songs within a few minutes is trying to look active.
• The offer. Spotify says that services which guarantee streams are not legitimate. Nobody can promise a number of streams from a real playlist, because real listeners decide what they play.

After your song is placed

Once your song is on a playlist, Spotify for Artists shows what the playlist does for it.

• Music, then Playlists lists the public playlists your song is on and the streams each one brings.
• Source of streams, under Segmentation on the song page, splits your streams by where they come from. Streams from a playlist that another user made show up as "Other listeners' playlists". You can switch the view between streams, listeners and streams per listener.

Two patterns need a closer look. Many streams from very few listeners, so a high number of streams per listener, can mean a few accounts playing your song on repeat. A sudden rise in listeners from a city or country where you have no audience can mean the same. The Audience tab shows where your listeners are.

If your song lands on a botted playlist

Act early, before the streams add up.

1. Report the playlist to Spotify for Artists support through the chat. Give them the link to the playlist, and ask them to confirm that it does not affect your account.
2. Ask the curator politely to remove your song. Most playlists have a contact address in the description.
3. If your distributor warns you about artificial streams, tell them how you promoted the song. Spotify says distributors can review this with Spotify when the streams were earned in good faith.

How we check playlists at Ovation

Before a playlist joins our network, we review it by hand. We run the checks in this post, we look at the playlist's history and at how listeners behave once a song is added, and we place songs of our own on it, so we can check its stream and listener numbers ourselves. After that, we follow the follower count of every playlist in the network over time.

You can read more about this in how we work with curators. Every placement in a campaign shows up in your dashboard with a direct link to the playlist in Spotify. To start a campaign, build it in the campaign builder.