Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
Does Spotify have an affiliate program?
No. And, according to our research, it doesn’t have a referral program either. While this is certainly a bummer, there’s some Spotify affiliate program alternatives you can use if you want to monetize music traffic.
Also, be sure to check out my Song Lyric niche report– it shows you how I’d build a song lyric authority site.
Spotify Affiliate Alternatives
Amazon Associates: pays 5% commission on Digital Music.
Apple Services Performance Partners: their payouts are somewhat complex- it depends on subscription type (Individual Membership, Family Membership, Student Membership) and local market rate. Read more about their commission structure here.
Spotify Keywords
While Spotify doesn’t have an affiliate program, it’s always interesting to check out the type of keywords that the site ranks for.
Especially if you were going to use the Amazon or Apple affiliate programs because the music keyword rankings are going to be somewhat similar. Below, I extracted 1,000 of Spotify’s top performing organics keywords.
You can see that they primarily rank for song titles and artists names. For example, the African American anthem “lift every voice and sing” gets 20,000 searches a month and Spotify ranks number one for it.
Interestingly, you can see that the Smithsonian site monetizes this keyword by running ads- actually an ad for Spotify:
Remember: even though Spotify doesn’t have an affiliate program, you can always make money running ads on the content.
What I Would Do
If I wanted to start a site monetizing traffic in the song title or artist name space, there are a couple different ways you can go. As I’ve written about before, you can start a song lyric website, republishing the lyrics to popular songs and perhaps throwing in a little bit of unique content for SEO purposes.
You could start a niche music website, perhaps focusing on a specific genre of music and trying to rank for all of the artists and songs in that vertical. It could be a news style music site. So you would be producing a lot of short, topical content.
Basically news items that would attract a lot of direct traffic to your site as people begin to rely on you for up-to-date information.
You could even niche down even farther, creating a fan site for a particular artist. The advantage here, if you do it well, you might have larger ranking potential because your site has a tighter focus.
You also attract more invested readers who are passionate about that artist. The downside, of course, is that you are tethered to the popularity of a particular artist. If they lose popularity or retire, you could lose a lot of traffic. Plus your traffic control is capped- you won’t be able to expand into different artist verticals if you completely tether your site to a solitary performer.
Monetization
You can try affiliate angle by promoting concert tickets. Check out my ticket/event niche report. You can link to Amazon and Apple, even using a tool like ThirstyAffiliates to automatically link song titles to the relevant Amazon and Apple affiliate landing pages.
However, I think this is more of an ads play. The goal would be to build up traffic to the point where you can get into Mediavine or AdThrive. Those ad networks make it incredibly easy to install highly profitable display ads across your website.
There are a lot of high volume low competition terms in the music niche. While the affiliate opportunity is somewhat scarce, you can make a good amount of money running ads on this content.
Summing up
While Spotify doesn’t have an affiliate program, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon this niche entirely. There are some affiliate program alternatives and a fortune to be made running ads on content if you can get the traffic.
Last Updated on March 13, 2021 by Ryan Nelson
