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I am an artist manager, and also run a small record label. The relationship I have with Spotify Playlists is one that I deem to be quite unhealthy, and yet it is something I spend a lot of my time on.

Whenever one of our artists has a release coming out, I painstakingly pitch the track to Spotify’s backend Spotify For Artists, as well as doing up a more detailed pitch to my label’s distributor, who then (presumably) pitch to their direct contacts at the various DSPs (a DSP is a Digital Service Provider such as Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal etc).

The reason I and thousands of others do this is to get a shot at one of the most coveted prizes in modern music - The Spotify Editorial Playlist.

What Are Spotify Editorial Playlists? They are official playlists curated by Spotify staff where thousands of people will hear new (or old) music for the first time.

You can always tell a Spotify Playlist as they are down as the owner of the playlist on the platform (think Fresh Folk, Peaceful Piano, New Music Friday UK etc).

As of today there are 1,520 official Spotify Playlists that serve every genre under the sun.

Lots of artists would be familiar with the Spotify For Artists backend, which is where they can make their pitch. It’s essentially a bite-sized sales pitch that you send into Spotify’s team in order to be considered for their Editorial Playlisting which typically updates every Friday.

Sometimes when you release music it gets picked up on these playlists and it can stay there for anything from a week to a few months. Fantastic! More people will listen to your music and hopefully resonate with it.

Sometimes however it doesn’t get chosen for these coveted playlists, and that can be devastating to an artist or a label. This is because in the current music release landscape, Spotify Editorial Playlisting is a central facet of nearly all ‘mainstream’ release strategies. Some labels rely entirely on playlisting to see if their campaign was a success or not. Put simply, it’s the only currency of note right now when releasing music digitally.

Playlists, whilst they can be fantastic and open your ears to wonderful new music (I’ve had this one on heavy repeat of late), are not conducive to providing the majority of artists with utility or growth in any real sense.

Playlists encourage passive listening. That in itself is fine, but most of the artists that feature on these playlists will get a boost in streams, perhaps a boost in followers, but not much else in terms of user retention. And even worse, when the playlists stop picking the track up, you haven’t gained much except a few hundred dollars and a few followers, who you can’t evaluate or measure on an individual basis.

The vast majority of people will listen passively whilst undergoing another task such as studying, driving, cooking, you name it, and will not actively follow the artist’s career after the track is done.

There is of course the odd instance where a track will resonate to the point where someone takes action. Spotify playlists can be a beautiful discovery tool, and some people will find an artist on Spotify and become massive fans. This would be a big win for the artist if Spotify didn’t withhold so much data from them, but unfortunately that is not the case.

I work with an artist who just released a single that got very nice pickup on Editorial Playlists. We released the track on the Tuesday and you can see that there was a significant boost on the Friday (when Spotify update their Playlists) and after that great first week, we’re seeing the dreaded slump begin after it has surely been removed from the big weekly playlists such as New Music Friday.

This is the extent of the data we get - we get details on the amount of streams but very little data on who is streaming the track.

We do get info on demographics - age group, gender, country etc, but we’re never told who listens to the music the most - the true fans - and this is the information that the artist needs the most.

Those fans that do resonate with your art, and who come back day after day to listen, sign up to your newsletter and see when you’re playing in their town are kept at arms length from the artist.

The data that artists need that could really benefit their careers are to distinguish which fans are superfans. There is no way to single out superfans or ‘actively engaged’ fans from your passive listening fans, and Spotify like it this way. It means that they can continue to keep the playlist as their primary source of value to their shareholders (aka the larger labels).

Data is incredibly valuable for any industry, let alone one that is based almost entirely digitally such as non-live music consumption.

The data that Spotify collects is of huge value to the company themselves. They can see which tracks perform well, which artist is popping off on the platform, and they have focused detail on each user’s listening habits.

There is no incentive for Spotify to release all of their data to artists. That would allow the artist’s team to extract value from their follower-base off platform, something that isn’t aligned with Spotify’s corporate goals. I get it, they’re incentivized to keep people on the platform and they’re definitely incentivized to remain as the market leader.

Spotify actually do a better job of letting the artist under the hood than any other of the major music streaming platforms. Apple Music have very limited back-end customization options to artists and their teams, and whilst Amazon have launched a comprehensive backend for artists, it is still in its early stages and not as slick as Spotify.

Plus - very few people actually care about Apple, Amazon and Tidal and the other competitors when it comes to whether their music gets playlisted or not. In my experience, almost 100% of all efforts from labels and managers is based around Spotify, further centralizing the way in which music gets released. Not ideal, but the only currency right now in a mainstream way is the Spotify Editorial Playlist.

A growing thesis regarding music and NFTs/Web 3 is that artists should now focus on quality over quantity, and they need a small number of superfans to sustain them, as opposed to many hundreds of thousands of anonymous streams, where the artist is beholden to centralized curators to be placed on large playlists.

The issue right now is how does the artist get access to data? It is tricky and requires a lot of middle-men.

An artist can promote an email list on social media, then can monitor the open rate of those subscribers who sign up, they can scan data from bandcamp or other online webstore interface to see where sales are coming in, and then start building a database of ‘superfans’ - those fans who are actively interested in the artist’s career and are a high worth fan.

There is a community building organization called Indiepreneur who have been showing artists how to find their true fans, build a community and then monetize it. They have a suite of products and tools (as well as a great podcast) which breaks down how to gain a certain sense of ownership of their data and their fan connection experience.

The issue with many of their tools is that they are reliant on focusing on ad spend to centralized gatekeepers (most frequently Meta through Instagram and Facebook), and this is a less than ideal situation for those hoping for an open transparent digital music landscape. That being said, they’re doing good work within the parameters that they have been given.

There are a myriad of Web 3 services and tools that are launching all the time that are geared towards giving the artist more power and control over their music and their data, but as of now they are so niche and small that they pose no immediate solution to the current state of the music industry as a whole.

The fact that members of Spotify’s team are the ones who decide which music rises to the top and which music doesn’t is not good for the industry as a whole.

Aesthetically it’s not a good look in general, but it is made even worse by the fact that large centralized entities own some of Spotify, and these entities have a very significant interest on what music gets playlisted and championed.

When Spotify was founded and was handing out percentages to the big recording companies, Sony BMG got 6%; Universal Music Group got 5%; Warner Music Group got 4%; EMI Music got 2%; Merlin got 1%.

That’s 18% of the platform’s stock, and therefore they have a say in how the platform is run, meaning they have control over the playlists - the main source of currency on Spotify. This is very centralized amongst a few large corporate entities. Not great.

Collective ownership of Web 3 protocols will bring about an element of community curation that can allow a new way to discover new music without major label ownership influencing specific trends and artists.

It also (in theory) allows artists to own a much fairer share of the value they create and of the value the specific protocols create.

There is of course a risk to this, as all three major labels have recently started hiring for Web 3 related roles, meaning that they mean to partake in this new era of music, but the hope is that the protocols themselves will be built in such a way as no one or few entities can meaningfully manipulate or control the platform.

Tastemakers will emerge, but the hope is that these tastemakers will be individuals or collectives as opposed to conglomerates.

This is all speculation and somewhat utopian thinking, but if the legacy music world embraces a few of these new Web 3 platforms, the idea is that they are built in a trustless, transparent way that democratizes the listening and discovery experience, something that we don’t have today.

With all the buzz about music stepping into Web 3 (no better described by the consistently brilliant and thorough reporting of Water + Music in their most recent Season 2 drop on music and the metaverse), it remains to be seen if any of the platforms working on building a more decentralized online world can take a meaningful slice of market share from the legacy platforms.

That said, there is hopeful optimism that these new protocols and use cases can provide less centralized music curation & discovery, allowing people to follow individual tastemakers to show them new music, as opposed to a centralized entity.

The reality is that this is probably a long way off, but the optimistically speaking, it’s probably going to happen eventually.

Thank you for reading. Please subscribe below to get notified of all articles. No spam - promise.

Subscribe now

Follow on Twitter

Thank you for visiting. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

I am an artist manager, and also run a small record label. The relationship I have with Spotify Playlists is one that I deem to be quite unhealthy, and yet it is something I spend a lot of my time on.

Whenever one of our artists has a release coming out, I painstakingly pitch the track to Spotify’s backend Spotify For Artists, as well as doing up a more detailed pitch to my label’s distributor, who then (presumably) pitch to their direct contacts at the various DSPs (a DSP is a Digital Service Provider such as Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal etc).

The reason I and thousands of others do this is to get a shot at one of the most coveted prizes in modern music - The Spotify Editorial Playlist.

What Are Spotify Editorial Playlists? They are official playlists curated by Spotify staff where thousands of people will hear new (or old) music for the first time.

You can always tell a Spotify Playlist as they are down as the owner of the playlist on the platform (think Fresh Folk, Peaceful Piano, New Music Friday UK etc).

As of today there are 1,520 official Spotify Playlists that serve every genre under the sun.

Lots of artists would be familiar with the Spotify For Artists backend, which is where they can make their pitch. It’s essentially a bite-sized sales pitch that you send into Spotify’s team in order to be considered for their Editorial Playlisting which typically updates every Friday.

Sometimes when you release music it gets picked up on these playlists and it can stay there for anything from a week to a few months. Fantastic! More people will listen to your music and hopefully resonate with it.

Sometimes however it doesn’t get chosen for these coveted playlists, and that can be devastating to an artist or a label. This is because in the current music release landscape, Spotify Editorial Playlisting is a central facet of nearly all ‘mainstream’ release strategies. Some labels rely entirely on playlisting to see if their campaign was a success or not. Put simply, it’s the only currency of note right now when releasing music digitally.

Playlists, whilst they can be fantastic and open your ears to wonderful new music (I’ve had this one on heavy repeat of late), are not conducive to providing the majority of artists with utility or growth in any real sense.

Playlists encourage passive listening. That in itself is fine, but most of the artists that feature on these playlists will get a boost in streams, perhaps a boost in followers, but not much else in terms of user retention. And even worse, when the playlists stop picking the track up, you haven’t gained much except a few hundred dollars and a few followers, who you can’t evaluate or measure on an individual basis.

The vast majority of people will listen passively whilst undergoing another task such as studying, driving, cooking, you name it, and will not actively follow the artist’s career after the track is done.

There is of course the odd instance where a track will resonate to the point where someone takes action. Spotify playlists can be a beautiful discovery tool, and some people will find an artist on Spotify and become massive fans. This would be a big win for the artist if Spotify didn’t withhold so much data from them, but unfortunately that is not the case.

I work with an artist who just released a single that got very nice pickup on Editorial Playlists. We released the track on the Tuesday and you can see that there was a significant boost on the Friday (when Spotify update their Playlists) and after that great first week, we’re seeing the dreaded slump begin after it has surely been removed from the big weekly playlists such as New Music Friday.

This is the extent of the data we get - we get details on the amount of streams but very little data on who is streaming the track.

We do get info on demographics - age group, gender, country etc, but we’re never told who listens to the music the most - the true fans - and this is the information that the artist needs the most.

Those fans that do resonate with your art, and who come back day after day to listen, sign up to your newsletter and see when you’re playing in their town are kept at arms length from the artist.

The data that artists need that could really benefit their careers are to distinguish which fans are superfans. There is no way to single out superfans or ‘actively engaged’ fans from your passive listening fans, and Spotify like it this way. It means that they can continue to keep the playlist as their primary source of value to their shareholders (aka the larger labels).

Data is incredibly valuable for any industry, let alone one that is based almost entirely digitally such as non-live music consumption.

The data that Spotify collects is of huge value to the company themselves. They can see which tracks perform well, which artist is popping off on the platform, and they have focused detail on each user’s listening habits.

There is no incentive for Spotify to release all of their data to artists. That would allow the artist’s team to extract value from their follower-base off platform, something that isn’t aligned with Spotify’s corporate goals. I get it, they’re incentivized to keep people on the platform and they’re definitely incentivized to remain as the market leader.

Spotify actually do a better job of letting the artist under the hood than any other of the major music streaming platforms. Apple Music have very limited back-end customization options to artists and their teams, and whilst Amazon have launched a comprehensive backend for artists, it is still in its early stages and not as slick as Spotify.

Plus - very few people actually care about Apple, Amazon and Tidal and the other competitors when it comes to whether their music gets playlisted or not. In my experience, almost 100% of all efforts from labels and managers is based around Spotify, further centralizing the way in which music gets released. Not ideal, but the only currency right now in a mainstream way is the Spotify Editorial Playlist.

A growing thesis regarding music and NFTs/Web 3 is that artists should now focus on quality over quantity, and they need a small number of superfans to sustain them, as opposed to many hundreds of thousands of anonymous streams, where the artist is beholden to centralized curators to be placed on large playlists.

The issue right now is how does the artist get access to data? It is tricky and requires a lot of middle-men.

An artist can promote an email list on social media, then can monitor the open rate of those subscribers who sign up, they can scan data from bandcamp or other online webstore interface to see where sales are coming in, and then start building a database of ‘superfans’ - those fans who are actively interested in the artist’s career and are a high worth fan.

There is a community building organization called Indiepreneur who have been showing artists how to find their true fans, build a community and then monetize it. They have a suite of products and tools (as well as a great podcast) which breaks down how to gain a certain sense of ownership of their data and their fan connection experience.

The issue with many of their tools is that they are reliant on focusing on ad spend to centralized gatekeepers (most frequently Meta through Instagram and Facebook), and this is a less than ideal situation for those hoping for an open transparent digital music landscape. That being said, they’re doing good work within the parameters that they have been given.

There are a myriad of Web 3 services and tools that are launching all the time that are geared towards giving the artist more power and control over their music and their data, but as of now they are so niche and small that they pose no immediate solution to the current state of the music industry as a whole.

The fact that members of Spotify’s team are the ones who decide which music rises to the top and which music doesn’t is not good for the industry as a whole.

Aesthetically it’s not a good look in general, but it is made even worse by the fact that large centralized entities own some of Spotify, and these entities have a very significant interest on what music gets playlisted and championed.

When Spotify was founded and was handing out percentages to the big recording companies, Sony BMG got 6%; Universal Music Group got 5%; Warner Music Group got 4%; EMI Music got 2%; Merlin got 1%.

That’s 18% of the platform’s stock, and therefore they have a say in how the platform is run, meaning they have control over the playlists - the main source of currency on Spotify. This is very centralized amongst a few large corporate entities. Not great.

Collective ownership of Web 3 protocols will bring about an element of community curation that can allow a new way to discover new music without major label ownership influencing specific trends and artists.

It also (in theory) allows artists to own a much fairer share of the value they create and of the value the specific protocols create.

There is of course a risk to this, as all three major labels have recently started hiring for Web 3 related roles, meaning that they mean to partake in this new era of music, but the hope is that the protocols themselves will be built in such a way as no one or few entities can meaningfully manipulate or control the platform.

Tastemakers will emerge, but the hope is that these tastemakers will be individuals or collectives as opposed to conglomerates.

This is all speculation and somewhat utopian thinking, but if the legacy music world embraces a few of these new Web 3 platforms, the idea is that they are built in a trustless, transparent way that democratizes the listening and discovery experience, something that we don’t have today.

With all the buzz about music stepping into Web 3 (no better described by the consistently brilliant and thorough reporting of Water + Music in their most recent Season 2 drop on music and the metaverse), it remains to be seen if any of the platforms working on building a more decentralized online world can take a meaningful slice of market share from the legacy platforms.

That said, there is hopeful optimism that these new protocols and use cases can provide less centralized music curation & discovery, allowing people to follow individual tastemakers to show them new music, as opposed to a centralized entity.

The reality is that this is probably a long way off, but the optimistically speaking, it’s probably going to happen eventually.

Thank you for reading. Please subscribe below to get notified of all articles. No spam - promise.

Subscribe now

Follow on Twitter