Music promotion email template for playlist curators

Most curator pitches are rejected by the inbox, not the human. They arrive from a free mailbox with a mismatched sender name, they carry a wall of attachments, or they are sent to a list of addresses that was never checked. If you want the pitch to be read at all, start with the delivery mechanics: a mailbox on a domain you control, a sender name matching your artist name, and an address list built from published curator contacts rather than a scraped dump.

The second failure is volume without targeting: the same generic paragraph sent to three hundred curators across every genre. Curators can tell. A pitch that names their playlist, their last addition in your genre and the specific track you want considered reads as work; a pitch that calls them "dear curator" reads as bulk mail. The template below is built so that the first line cannot be written without doing that small piece of research.

Line one names the playlist and why this track fits it. Not "I hope this finds you well" — that sentence costs you the open. Something like: "You run Quiet Mornings, which leans acoustic and slow; my track sits in that pocket at 92 BPM." Line two is the artist context in one sentence: where you are from, what you have released, one verifiable fact such as a support slot or a radio play. Line three is the ask, phrased as a question the curator can answer with yes, no or not yet.

Under that, put a compact metadata block: artist, track, genre, mood, tempo, duration, clean or explicit, release date, territory availability and one link. Curators work in batches, so a block they can scan in four seconds is worth more than a paragraph of biography. If you use an outreach platform, this is the part to keep as a saved template so every send carries the same fields — the same discipline described in how to build a music contact list.

Subject: Waconzy — "Slow Water" (Afro-soul, 96 BPM). Body: "Hi [name] — I am [artist], writing from [city]. You run [playlist], which is where I found [reference track] last month, so I think the fit is close. My new single Slow Water is Afro-soul at 96 BPM with a live bass line, released [date], clean version available. If it fits, here is the link: [one streaming link]. If it does not, no problem — I would rather know than keep emailing. Thanks for the time."

Then the metadata block, then your signature with artist name, website and one social profile. That is the whole email. It is short because the curator decides in seconds and because a short email is easier to reply to. Do not attach the press kit; a link to a page with the artwork, credits and a one-sheet is enough, and it keeps the message under the size where spam filters start to look harder.

Send Tuesday to Thursday, morning in the curator’s own time zone where you know it. Avoid the day before a major release Friday and avoid the week between Christmas and New Year, when playlist teams are thin. One follow-up after five to seven working days is normal and expected; a second follow-up after another week is the absolute limit. After that, stop and mark the contact as "not now" so your list stays clean.

The follow-up itself should add something, not repeat the ask: a live performance video, a radio add, a remix, or a note that the track has a new edit. If you cannot add anything, that is a signal the follow-up is not worth sending. This is also the point where most campaigns quietly waste their allowance — see how to respond to a curator rejection for what to do with the no.

Suppose you have a $49 Starter plan: 2,000 emails a month, up to 1,000 contacts, one managed mailbox. You cannot email 40 curators five times and call it a campaign; that is 200 sends, which fits easily, but the useful part is the reply handling. Budget your sends: 40 first contacts, 40 follow-ups, and a second-wave list of 40 more if the first wave produces fewer than five replies.

Write the first line for each curator before you write the body. If you cannot name their playlist and one track on it, drop them from the wave rather than send a generic line. The arithmetic is deliberately boring: 40 personalised sends, one follow-up each, a clean list and a real mailbox beat 500 untargeted sends every time, and the 2,000-email allowance is a ceiling, not a target.