Say It With Playlists! 🎧👌

Avoid the lazy titles “My Brand Playlist”. Playlists can say much more!

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Anything is better when it comes with music — a subway ride squeezed among fellow workers, a late morning coffee at Starbucks, a reading session on GQ (or scrolling on 9Gag), a Uber ride late in the rainy night…

We’ve met many brand managers, journalists, influencers, who KNOW for sure that sharing music is important, but DON’T KNOW what kind of playlists to curate. It generally falls back to the conventional “Editors playlist”, “This week in music”, or “Song of the day” playlists.

But tell me which listener would reasonably launch a playlist whose title says “I’m just a bunch of tracks, and I’ve been curated by a neutral entity?” Let’s be listener-centric. Most people want music to enjoy a deeper life, not to do a thesis on how the last week new West Coast hip-hop lyrics have evolved since Trump election.

Playlists can talk! They can convey any brand message if you give them a context. They can become powerful assets in your editorial or marketing efforts. Here are a 3 tips showing that basically any influencer, related to music or not, can say it with playlists!

1. Make playlists say how to better enjoy your core experience.

If you think about it, whatever services you offer, whatever brand image you have, there’s always a good way to listen to music around it. We’ve seen this centuries-old national meteorological service — quite new to social networks — creating a seasonal playlist evolving with the week’s weather forecast: cold electro tunes for winter, warm chillout for summer. They have extended their core service to music in a simple yet creative way.

If you do brand marketing for a city subway, why don’t you create a weekly “Squeezed in the sub” playlist to be close to your passengers, day after day? If you’re developing the notoriety of a cooking website, why don’t you add a “20min timer Italian indie playlist” on the side of your one-pot-pasta recipe? There are always simple ideas to avoid the “[My brand]’s Playlist” marketing abyss and show people how to better appreciate your core activity in music.

2. Make playlists say who you are… like, intimately!

If you are a public figure, artist, fashion blogger, YouTuber, leader, executive, you start getting into this weird “People” area where people start having this obsessive need to know basically anything about you, where you live, your sentimental status, your music tastes… That’s how it is so you should play with it!

In the ongoing race for French presidency, left-wing candidate Benoît Hamon shared a playlist which says “I’m not just a poster, I’m real, I’m close to you and here for you”. His supporters loved it, his detractors loved to hate it.

If you are not a famous personality (at least famous to your community), you can always invite other influencers to curate playlists on your media channels. There’s this lifestyle blogger “Inside Closet” who shoots people right in their flat and ask them for a playlist to feel intimate with their lifestyle both with the eyes and the ears.

Instead of sharing just a “2016 in Music by the Editors” playlist, French national newspaper Libération created a grid with 16 personal playlists curated directly by 16 emblematic journalists that people love to read all year long. It’s a way for them to be more than signatures at the bottom of articles, it’s a way to embody their staff and remind readers that as journalists, they write for a cause and not just for clicks.

3. Make playlists that anyone can stream

As usual if you’ve read our previous articles, we can only recommend you making playlists available to ALL your listeners regardless of their streaming platform (should be enshrined in the Constitution). It means not sharing it only with one streaming platform like YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music, but with ALL of them. If you don’t want to be rude to your fans, Soundsgood is here for that:

1. Create a catchy playlist which says something meaningful about you (or import it)
2. Publish it instantly across all your official streaming accounts
3. Share a single universal player on your website and social networks (demo).

So, let’s get started… Say It With Playlists!

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Louis Viallet for Soundsgood

ABOUT SOUNDSGOOD Soundsgood is the best playlist curation service for publishers, music professionals, brands and influencers. Soundsgood helps them reach all their listeners no matter what streaming service they use.