Let's start with what we are today - a purpose driven global community that believes music can make the world better. No longer dependent on finding a monetization strategy, we are a program of the musicto Foundation, a registered 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization.

Although still relatively small, musicto has a global community of around 40 people who actively contribute every month.  We use the creation of collaborative playlists to identify culture fit and establish connections between community members, we publish those playlists to attract the attention of artists and listeners alike.

Our website at musicto.com receives around 10,000 visitors a month, we publish playlists 2 to 3 times a week, and we receive over 150 new tracks a week submitted to the community by artists looking to get their music on our playlists.

While on the face of it - this doesn't sound terribly different from where we were a few years ago - the reality is we are fundamentally different in both culture and aspiration. This document is for the hundreds of people who came through musicto and contributed their time and talent. Thank you - we would not be here without you.

What We Thought musicto Was (2016 - 2019)

The original idea was simple: grow audiences for individual playlists and monetize the audience.

There was real belief and indicators that this would work. At one point we had 50 active playlists and were publishing 100 tracks on musicto.com every month. Curators were sharing tracks out to 60,000 social followers with over 10,000 subscribers to our playlists. Our growing visibility meant artists were finding us for track submissions. Playlists like burn a million miles, fight evil, and write an essay to were driving streams for the tracks they featured, and for a while - it looked like the whole thing might work.

What Broke

While social presence was important, the key metric for artists was number of streams inside Spotify. If a track generated a certain number of organic streams in a certain period of time, it was picked up and moved onto the algorithmically generated playlists like discover weekly and release radar. If the track did well there - i.e. - people liked it, pushed it onto their own playlists, etc, it could then be picked up by Spotify's own human curated country or genre lists, ultimately aiming to arrive on the holy grail of lists like Rap Caviar or Todays Top Hits. What musicto offered new artists was the initial spark to get them noticed by the algorithm.

Having spent its first decade nurturing the independent playlist curator, in April 2018 Spotify rebranded the app, de-featured the independent curators that had championed the platform, and replaced them with Spotify branded playlists. And so began the enshittification of the platform.

The effect on musicto curators was demoralizing. Running a playlist takes time - time to listen to loads of music in order to find a great track, time to write a paragraph or two about the track and give context around why someone should listen to it, time to source an image and send both off to be published, time to take the published post and share it out across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

This was OK so long as the platform was growing, subscriber counts were going up and the dream looked attainable. When it became clear that subscriber growth was slowing dramatically and that, while still feasible, it would take 5 years or more to grow a potentially monetizable audience, most curators put their list on hold.

Part 2:

• Shared alignment does not equal community

• Finding the glue

• The glue is not the goal

• Finding purpose