Spotify reports to have more than 406 million active users, that's 35% of the entire music streaming market. With over 82 million songs to choose from, users have created more than 4 billion playlists. Music distributor AWAL claims their artists typically see a 50-100 percent boost when featured on Spotify-sponsored playlists.
National Public Radio (commonly refered to as NPR) suggests that record labels spend more than $1,000,000 when marketing a hit song. It's not uncommon for portions of marketing budgets to be allocated specifically to playlisting. The ideology that great music alone is enough to break through the 60,000 songs released every day, is long dated.
An online study shows that even though 87% of the 489 independent musicians surveyed believe marketing their music is vitally important to success, only 32% spend their time evenly between marketing and music creation. If you're one of the 68% who would rather spend their time creating music, then you came to the right place.