Monetized Playlists on Choon isn’t even a week old yet, but it’s already causing a huge increase in track uploads and interesting market dynamics are rapidly developing.
As a reminder, Monetized Playlists allow artists to share their revenue with a playlist curator. The default is 5% of NOTES earned being given to the owner of the playlist, but we also allow artists to set whatever split percentage they want. We suspected this might lead to interesting strategies like offering 100% of revenues to playlists in order to promote your tracks. Alternatively, if you already have a top ranking track then maybe you decide to give 0% figuring that people will include you anyway.
Patterns Across the Entire Catalog
Now that we’re a few days into playlists being available, we can take a look at what people are doing and see if any of these strategies are being used. Here is the current playlist split distribution for all tracks on Choon:
Obviously there’s a large portion of tracks that are still at the default of 5%, so that range dominates the graph. However, we can clearly see a bump around two other common numbers: 25% and 50%. Splitting earnings 50/50 is an interesting strategy as it effectively means “Every play you bring to my track I’ll split with you down the middle.” Kind of makes sense.
Patterns in Recently Added Tracks
The chart for the entire catalog shows some interesting patterns, but we suspected that people who have uploaded tracks since the playlist feature went live might behave differently. To compare, here’s the same chart but only including tracks since playlists went live on the site:
Much more interesting! Less than half of new tracks are keeping the default 5% playlist split. We can see the bumps at 25% and 50% more clearly, and there’s a noticeable group focused solely on promotion up in the 90%+ range.
Do Playlist Creators Consider Split Percentage?
The key question for an artist in all of this is “How does playlist split affect my chances of being included in a playlist?” To answer that question, let’s add purple bars to the chart above showing how many of the tracks in that range have been added to a playlist:
From this chart it looks pretty clear that yes, increasing your split percentage does increases your track’s chance of being included in a playlist. It certainly doesn’t guarantee it, as playlist curators have strong incentives to maintain a high standard of quality, but it does have an effect.
Looking ahead, we have plans to create an advanced “playlist builder” interface that will surface metrics like splits for playlist creators. Even without that though, we’re already seeing some very interesting market dynamics forming.
Give it a try! Create your own playlist at https://choon.co
