Spotify, Apple Music and all of the music streaming platforms invest heavily in their playlists. Think about how you discover new music today. A lot of it will come from the playlists that feature on your streaming platform of choice. This article from Wired has taken a deep dive into these playlists and shows how important they have come to the whole music industry.
Playlists are generated in two ways – algorithmically, like Spotify’s Discover Weekly that takes your music tastes and tries to dig up more music you might like, and editorially, like Spotify’s RapCaviar that is a curated playlist by Spotify’s team and has become the most coveted real estate in hip-hop, racking up more than 7 billion streams in the past 5 years.
And for so many musicians and music labels, the name of the game is to get picked up by the algorithms or by the playlist editors and make it into these playlists.
Stories that demonstrate the power of these playlists are starting to emerge. Katy Perry discovered it after she gave Apple Music a temporary exclusive, and was blackballed from Spotify playlists.
While there is no denying the power of playlists, there is something alarmist about this article. When it argues that, “with radio, there were thousands of DJs deciding what to play… with streaming, just one faceless global giant programs each channel” it neglects the fact that these thousands of DJs often worked for just a few giant, faceless corporations. And within Spotify and Apple there are thousands of editors working on these playlists. More importantly, the new world of digital music has plenty more points of discovery that just playlists – TikTok and YouTube being two of the most obvious and impactful examples at the moment.
Still, this is a fascinating look at a part of the music industry that we interact with on a daily basis but probably don’t think a lot about. After reading this article, you’ll definitely be thinking about these playlists, and the artists that get featured, a little bit differently.
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