What is a Playlist? More Than a Collection of Songs

Today, the playlist is where listening happens. Since 2008, more than 2 billion playlists have been created on Spotify alone. Spotify’s top playlist, Today’s Top Hits, produced nearly 70 million hours of listening across over 8 million followers in 2015. The album, once the cornerstone of the music industry, has been usurped by the playlist: 31% of primary listening occurs through playlists as opposed to 29% through albums.

It’s clear that the way we consume popular music has changed and that playlists are the face of this change. But what are playlists, if not just collections of songs, and how do they operate in our lives?

Playlist function socially as an extension of what music lovers have done for generations: a way to share music.

When radio was the dominant form of music dissemination, DJs would assemble sequences of songs for large geographical areas to listen to. The DJ was “instrumental in founding new genres of music, by bringing together unconnected stylistic strands… In a similar way, the early disc jockeys were key in fostering understanding between different races and cultures.”

By the early 1980s, the rise of the cassette tape allowed music fans to curate and sequence their own selection of songs by recording directly from the radio and other sources. These “mixtapes” would then be provided to friends and loved ones as an “ultimate gift of self-expression”.

As the cassette gave way to the CD, and then the CD to the digital audio file, the desire to creatively exchange music with those closest to us has not gone away. In fact, having access to a library of over 30 million songs and the ability to instantly deliver playlists via internet sharing has brought the mixtape into the 21st century.

Just like LPs, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s before them, playlists offer a new way to package music as a product, one that takes advantage of increasing consumer access to streaming technologies.

Labels and streaming services alike have developed playlist curation teams designed to maximize listening and discovery of new artists. Not only do playlists provide the ability to promote multiple artists and songs in a single product, but also allow labels to draw from a larger repertoire than an individual album affords; as revenue models shift from direct sales to real-time streaming royalties, the ability to encourage more listening is invaluable. In fact, “because streaming has melded discovery and consumption into a single whole,” playlists have become the new horizon for profit in the music industry (evidenced by major labels hiring playlist strategists).

So we know that playlists are already plugged into our culture on both a personal and a business level; they are the new reality of our listening. However, we have very little understanding of what playlists are telling us about who listeners are and what they care about. Further, content producers and curators are in the dark when it comes to predicting how playlists can be leveraged to create moments of discovery and happiness for listeners.

What can be done to bring the hidden humanity of playlists into the light?

This is where Chartmetric comes in, a new technology that helps establish a comprehensive understanding of what is happening in the rapidly changing landscape of playlists and curation.

Introducing Chartmetric

While you are listening to the music contained within playlists, Chartmetric is listening to the data. By tracking the performance of tens of thousands of songs and artists, and the playlists they inhabit, we are beginning to decipher the mysteries of playlist performance and listener behavior. Every day, we are excited by what our product reveals and imagine what the industry might do with such a powerful tool.

Fortunately, we aren’t keeping this technology to ourselves: by using Chartmetric, you too will begin to understand how playlists have changed the landscape of the music industry and how you can take advantage of these changes going into the future.

We invite you to join us in this new chapter of music consumption, distribution, and discovery by signing up for Chartmetric today.