’They could destroy the album’: how Spotify’s playlists have changed music for ever | Music | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/17/they-could-destroy-the-album-how-spotify-playlists-have-changed-music-f
Venezuelan singer Danny Ocean was languishing in obscurity when he released Me Rehúso independently in September – and then Spotify changed his life. As the track started to build slowly on the Central American viral charts, the streaming service – spotting these spikes in plays – threw its weight behind it, putting it into multiple playlists this year. It has now passed 261m streams on Spotify alone, and Ocean has signed to Warners, a label that, post-Luis Fonsi’s huge hit Despacito, views him as the next Latin crossover star.
If Spotify decides, as in the case of Ocean, to throw its weight behind a song in such blandly named playlists as New Music Friday, Today’s Top Hits, RapCaviar or Afternoon Acoustic, it can catapult an act from obscurity to the top of the worldwide charts. True, the Swedish streaming giant can make the already-big even bigger – see Ed Sheeran’s annexing of the UK Top 20 in March – but it can also give unknowns a huge boost. These playlists are becoming arguably more important than radio in bringing new music to the masses; they hold the hands of a mass-market audience that is moving over to streaming but can find navigating 40m tracks overwhelming.
“Artists are also always being featured on another artist’s track,” adds Dominic Wallace, a music editor for the streaming service Deezer.
The result is playlist carpet-bombing: as with Despacito, acts are vying to be on as many key playlists as possible to get the cumulative streams they need to have a serious chart impact. Alternatively, releases are being designed to have multiple impact points: with Coldplay’s Kaleidoscope EP, different tracks were drip-fed over several months to keep the release present on ever-refreshing playlists.
“The industry is getting much smarter at understanding the Spotify playlist portfolio,” says Ergatoudis. “There are pitches for specific playlists more often now. This didn’t happen even a year ago.”
Second, Spotify, because it is so far ahead of everyone else (140 million active users, of whom 60 million are paying subscribers, compared with Apple Music’s 27 million subscribers), has become a playlisting priority for labels, ratcheting up its dominance yet further. Spotify has a vested interest in making playlists – particularly its in-house playlists – the lingua franca of streaming. “I think this is now Spotify’s entire world,” says Darren Hemmings, who runs digital marketing agency Motive Unknown. “Spotify doesn’t own the catalogue, so it has to have power on some level. They could be looking to completely destroy the album as a format, if we are going to be extreme about it, and replace it with playlisting.”
When I ask Wallace if he feels the album will be superseded by track-centric playlists, his assessment is blunt: “Probably, yes.”
However, just as artists, labels and users are starting to get a handle on how playlists work, the floor below them is about to give way. We see playlists as visual, text-based entities, but the rise of the voice-activated speaker – with Apple and Google looking to close ground on Amazon’s Echo – could change everything again.
“[The future] is going to be much more around situation and context for the user and the music they are looking for at a particular moment,” says Vivero. “People are going to have to know enough about a song or an artist to ask for it by name.”
Playlists are currently a buffet trolley of music, being wheeled in front of listeners to pick from and allowing conditional choice. But voice control could see everything reduced to trigger words – “happy music”, “60s”, “EDM”, “yoga” – defined by context. Asking Alexa for “new music” or “a song that will change my life” could see wildly variable results. Playlists are currently in a power-sharing agreement between the fan and the music industry, but the move to voice-control could ironically see record labels – those masters of hectoring – put on mute