(Dawning Of) A True Era: Playlist Consumers vs Followers

In this “post-truth” age it’s no surprise the entertainment industry has embraced speculation, hyperbole and grandiose claims about technologies ability to predict the future, resurrect the past and replace flawed business models.

Two popular myths regarding playlists are that follower count is an indication of a playlists “worth” and that a listener count can somehow be magically derived from the change in followers over time.

So let’s unpack the myth and uncover some truths. If we look at the followers for Spotify playlists Classic Road Trip Songs (1.1m), Today’s Top Hits (21.6m) and Sleep (2.9m), it’s fairly apparent they have very different counts; in fact Classic Road Trip Songs only just passed 1m, so why even include them in this example?

If we look at the name and description of each playlist we could make some assumptions about its purpose and the type of audience they might attract. With this we could devise a model that took into account things like repeat plays (Sleep being the most obvious one for those), skips (everyone fighting over their favourite song on a Road Trip) and drop off (the spin class finishes before the end of a Top Hits playlist).

As well as being time consuming and expensive, the biggest flaw in this approach is follower counts are quite unreliable as a metric in the first place.

Very often a playlist will gain followers quickly when it is launched or triggered by significant events, such as the Football World Cup or Valentines Day, but most of that listenership will never revisit those playlists again. Further to this, unlike traditional social media, music fans dont “unfollow” playlists, so a top performer is likely trading off fans gained months or even years ago.

Finally, and most obviously, most listeners don’t follow the bulk of the playlists they consume.

So what can we do to better understand the true value of a single playlist amongst the hundreds of thousands available across a growing list of vendors?

At Entertainment Intelligence (Ei) we feel the only metrics worth measuring are daily streams and unique fans, across multiple territories and a broad spectrum of musical genres and tastes.

We are lucky to work with a diverse catalogue of 3m tracks, from indie heavyweights like Arctic Monkeys and Bon Iver; a vast classical library at Naxos; electronic legends Above & Beyond; jazz and americana at Concord Music Group; christian at Hillsong.

It’s this diversity and breadth that allows us to take a proper reading of a playlists health and potential.

Now take our three example playlists, and add in the average number of streams a single track from our catalogue, in position 30 or above, will generate in one day. We can see some surprising results.

All three playlists averaging around 14k streams per track per day, regardless of the number of songs on the list (Sleep has 157, three times the other two).

So taking this very quick example we know that focusing on playlists of 3m followers or more would have left you in the dark about valuable contributors to your streaming strategy.

Finally, if you still need convincing, we took a random sample of one track achieving similar weekly streaming numbers across two playlists (Soul Lounge 6,601 and Brekkie Time 7,294) with vastly different followers (502,682 and 124,501 respectively).

This is not unusual, this is the norm, this is the truth.

Over the coming months Ei will be releasing a new set of music data metrics called Indie Benchmarks, for all those that have joined our rapidly growing club.

Check us out if you want to know more and watch this space for further exploration and insight from the world of digital entertainment data.