Spotify's Algorithm and the unbelievable value of "curator playlists"

and how artists are blowing up from them

Today’s post is a theme that was a chapter in the Music Curator Guide that I dropped a few weeks ago. It’s important for artists and music curators to realize the power that is a content driven playlist. It’s a cheat code, and understanding this will open your eyes to the value that music curators have for artists today. I have over 500,000 people who follow my playlists, and I’ve learned a lot about what my playlists can do for artists. Let me show you

The Value of Music Curators and their playlists

Like I’ve mentioned before, the music industry is changing very fast. Music curators are the new Radio DJ’s. The new YouTube Channels. The new Music Blogs. “Tastemakers” if you will. In fact, in 2020 a headline that would change my life from Rolling Stone read:

 “The Future of music Journalism… is on TikTok” - Rolling Stone Magazine

They went on to talk about how artists were blowing up during quarantine by what they referred to as “TikTok music blogs” - or - music curators as we now call them. 

“...that have flourished during quarantine by helping TikTok’s massive, youthful user base sift through the endless stream of music that is uploaded daily to streaming services.” 

It all starts with the playlists. But what’s better than a playlist? A playlist built digitally via short form video.

The power of curation 

I’m very bullish that the most value you can offer an artist today is a piece of content with a strong call to action that goes viral for their song or project. But a close second is the playlists the curators are making that come from the content they post. Let me break it down for you. 

The value of a playlist that is created and promoted via TikTok is a high powered machine for a lot of reasons, but the biggest in my opinion is the funnel. I always say, a playlist is only as good as the last 500 people who followed it. Why?

Retention.

Listeners who find (or are reminded of) a playlist are most likely to listen to that playlist soon after saving it. That’s why you see some gigantic playlist that don’t push any listeners to the songs on it. Why? Because the listeners who saved that playlist have 30 newer playlists above it on their Spotify dashboard and they forgot about it. Something new and hot came along and took it’s place, and it’s very common for this to happen. These big playlists (typically driven by paid Instagram and facebook ads) for that reason aren’t driving consistent and quality traffic. So, with an organic content driven playlist (with zero paid ads), new quality listeners are consistently walking through the door- which is why a playlist with 10k followers, 8k of the followers new, will outperform a playlist with 100k followers and just 2k of the followers new. 

Now, back to the funnel aspect. 

Think about who those people are who just saved your playlist from a post that gets 100k views. Who are they? Well, thanks for the TikTok and Instagram algorithm, we can bet that those are some high quality listeners of that genre. Why?

Let me break it down further:

TikTok and Instagram take your video about a certain genre, and if you do it right- they will find those fans scrolling on the app. Of those people who watch it, a smaller percentage of people will watch the whole thing and see the call to action to find the playlist at some point in the video (I do this in every single video without fail and highly suggest all curators do this). And then, an even smaller percentage will go to your link in bio to find the playlist, or even search it inside Spotify (or Apple). And an even SMALLER percentage will open the playlist, listen to it, and save the playlist. You may be asking why less and less people is better? Well what happened during this whole process, is with each level that a person passes through into the funnel from the video to your playlist, is without a doubt showing strong traits of being a true music fan within your video’s niche. And the streaming platforms love when these people find your playlists. The four steps it may take to get from the video to a stream can filter out a lot of people who are just mindlessly scrolling on the app. And again, Spotify LOVES this.

Who do you think Spotify likes more: a listener who is constantly listening to music, finding new artists, sharing music with others, saving songs, adding songs to their own playlists, and enjoying a high volume of artists every week -or- a listener who rarely finds new music, listens to mood playlists only but doesn’t save any songs, has the same music constantly in rotation, and opens the app a couple times a week? We can all agree it’s the former. So if you’re an artist, you want the highest quality listeners pressing play on your music. Not only are they real music fans who can translate to ticket sales, but these listeners will actually help Spotify find you new listeners just like them. And don’t forget- you want to be on the playlists where these high quality listeners are populating. Well to this date in the history of the streaming era, there is not better way for this to happen than TikTok (and now Reels too).

Lets go one level deeper here, because I want you to really understand why this all matters.

Spotify and Apple can tell what type of listener everyone is. After consistent high quality listeners with rich data and history are listening to the songs on the playlist, this is amazing for the Spotify’s algorithm and helps it push these songs to other (similar) users. So content driven playlists are not only gathering people who are pressing play while poking around (or just pressing shuffle) on that playlist- but the songs on the playlist getting traffic will begin to show up on more algorithmic playlists as well thanks to these listeners, who are active in discovering music, listen to the songs. It’s how these apps operate at their core. Because Spotify cares about nothing more than pleasing its users with music they like. Spotify will take the artists on the playlist and find the fans of the other artists ALSO on that playlist, putting the songs in front of more and more artists with potentially larger and similar audiences. This is very important for Spotify, because at the end of the day Spotify cares most about the listener’s experience and they created “Discover weekly” and “Radio” to be as valuable to the end user as possible. This data is constantly in motion in order to provide the best music to the users as possible.

Take my song “Smeds” as an example:

Since it’s been released, it’s gained over 200,000 streams from my playlist I’m a rap fan but these house songs SLAP.

But the song has 2.4 MILLION streams. So only 10% of the streams have come from my playlist, but this was my first song. I had ZERO data for Spotify before it was released. It didn’t know who listened to my music, which playlists I was featured on (because I had none obviously). Nothing. But my playlist TRAINED Spotify and the result? It pushed the song out 2.2 Million times based on the other artists on the playlist as well as the listeners TikTok found for the playlist. The only promotion I did was IG stories, I never posted it on TikTok either.

Lets be real- we need help finding the good sh*t

Now when we have access to every song distributed in the world, that’s a great thing. But there's one down side: How can we ever find all the good music when over 50,000 songs (and increasing) are released daily on Spotify alone? In reality- we the consumers are lazy. We are conditioned to having other sources (bingo- the radio stations, TV programmers, and music blogs) show us music to listen to. But the difference is that music curators are not controlled by a corporation or record labels. In the curator guide I talk in depth about how radio, TV, Blogs, and editorial playlists are all in the hands of the major labels. So curators are people, just like everyone else. We just have taken a responsibility and liking to finding and posting music we think people are going to love. Just like how we would rather trust a product that someone we know recommends. We don’t like being sold to. We don’t like being told what to listen to anymore from corporate players. You can see this in the way that companies now are advertising products. They are after user generated content (UGC) to push their products because they recognize the shift that has happened in marketing. We are trusting people not companies, so this intersects perfectly with people and songs. I’ve had experience with many labels who agree that the best way to push music (besides the artist’s own page) are tastemakers and curators who have a trusted audience. So as we go on, this will become more and more the case and curators are here to be trusted and effective for the industry. This can lead to so much upside that I promise you is out there for music curators and artists alike.

Many artists ask me how many streams my playlist will get them. That number varies a lot based on how the playlist is growing, if I have a video thats crushing and the traffic is high, and where the song is located on the list. It might get an artist as much as 1,000 streams in a single day. But the trailing streams it gets from the algorithm boost far outweigh the streams directly from the playlist. I’ve seen artists become much more favored in the Spotify algorithm after being in the playlist for a few months and this to me is the highest value for being added to a content driven playlist like mine.

Curators are the most important thing to happen to music since streaming. Together with artists, we can see the industry shifting and this playbook will continue to showcase how Putyouon Music Group is coming together to change it.