Why curated playlists is not the only option

Pedro
Pedro
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

There’s plenty of websites, blogs and curators out there creating playlists. Some of them are pretty good, some of them not that much but at the end of the day is all up to the curator which songs are added to the playlist.

Since it’s highly subjective, listeners would end up listening to a lot of music they don’t like 100% or they will end up skipping lots of songs too. Why does this happen? it happens because the playlist is created by someone who’s music taste is slightly different than the listener’s taste.

Real-time feedback from actual listeners

Most of the time we end up listening to what the curators or Radio Stations want to play. It is out of the scope of this blog to talk about the music selection, but one can quickly figure out the music being played is probably not picked by listeners, it is a business after all. Record labels want to promote their music and since they have connections with radio stations then we get to listen to that music.

Money and music promotion

In case of curators, musicians submit music to them and in theory curators will listen to thousands of songs, provide feedback and if the music is good enough it will be added to the playlists, most of the time music is not added to the playlists for multiple reasons. In many cases musicians submit music to the wrong playlist, that way they are out of the competition for the top spot.

In other cases, the curator thinks the music is not good and it won’t be added. Best case scenario, the musician didn’t spend money submitting music, but there are services out there that charge artists to listen to music, sometimes it’s not cheap.

In many cases lots of artists end up in a weak position where they either have to submit music to many curators, contact lots of bloggers or pay to be added to the playlist rotation.

The other option is to get feedback from actual listeners. Let the people decide what they like and what they don’t like. That way we will end up having a playlist that is built organically and artists can use that feedback to learn more about the fans and preferences.

What’s the benefit of this approach? Artists don’t have to wait on curator’s feedback, avoiding that bottleneck can save time (and maybe lots of money). Artists can potentially get feedback from thousands of listeners before releasing a song (it’s always a good idea to test the waters).

Pedro

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I am a Software Engineer and Entrepreneur

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