Not to mention, as it learns more about what listeners like to listen to and when, the company could start to make tailored content-just as Netflix began making its own shows after discovering people really love Adam Sandler. 'The idea of any playlist being the same thing to any person is going to become less and less as time goes on,' he says. Over time, Mulligan says, even things like Today's Top Hits or New Music Friday could be tuned to each user's particular taste. 'It's just putting your music in front of listeners that would never have seen it otherwise.' He says Spotify often hears from artists who went from part-time musicians to earning a living from their art after their placement on a couple small but well targeted playlists got them in front of the right audience.Īt the same time, Spotify is investing more in personalized playlists, like the algorithmically generated Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. 'Not everything has to be this gigantic Today's Top Hits thing,' Holmsten says. That's where editors become particularly important, scouring the musicverse for the tracks you'd love but would never find on the radio. The platform boasts fans of every imaginable genre the key for artists is finding the right match.

He insists that the beauty of Spotify lies in the fact it offers more than one path to success. 'It’s no one person’s feeling that matters.' 'There's absolutely no way to push our team,' he says. Editors exert some control over how a song enters the Spotify Playlist Machine, but Holmsten swears musicians can't beg, borrow, or bribe their way into Today's Top Hits. Holmsten says this process makes Spotify transparent with creators and impervious to their cajoling. People pull the levers that make it all work, sure, but you can't fake listener data. Spotify and other streaming services are all about data. Radio is simple, relatively speaking: Stations create playlists through a mix of data and human curation, swayed by relationships and the songs DJs wanted you to love. Spotify's programming runs counter to how music traditionally worked. On October 14, when nearly a million people were listening to the bouncy ballad each day, Spotify's editors added it to the Today's Top Hits playlist and its 14.4 million followers. When the song kept getting tens of thousands of streams daily, Spotify started peppering it into popular playlists worldwide, a strategy it calls 'playlisting.' The numbers kept looking good. Editors gave the song a little more exposure at the end of September when they added it to the Weekly Buzz and Pop Rising playlists, which count 1.1 million followers between them. Listeners took to it, according to Spotify's analytics that track how often people play a song, how much of that song they listen too, whether they add it to their own playlists, and more.

Two months after its release, a Spotify editor added it to the Danish version of the New Music Friday playlist. Still, the song didn't explode overnight.

In the process, they've changed the way artists and songs break. Spotify, Apple Music, and others have changed the people listen to music. He declined to prove it, but says his team certainly saw 'Call on Me' coming. Nick Holmsten, the service's head of shows and editorial, claims he could dig into the data and tell you which new song will be a hit in six months. Just as Facebook loves rolling out new features to a tiny subset of its users, killing what doesn't work and expanding on what does, Spotify considers every track a beta test. Think of it as the moneyball of music, a ruthlessly data-driven approach to introducing listeners to songs. These playlists, created by individual users or Spotify 'editors,' form the curated labyrinth through which Spotify can lead an artist or song from obscurity to mass appeal. The song owes much of its success to Spotify playlists. Although you hear it all over the radio now, Spotify users found themselves bouncing along to her synthy strains seven months ago. Hope wrote a certified hit single, one dwarfed only by the remix from Aussie DJ Ryan Riback. It hit number one on the Swedish charts, and went gold or platinum in nine countries. She released the track as her debut single in July, expecting it to be her swan song. 'I decided I was going to give it up and get a 'real job,'' she told the website Music Love. Starley Hope thought she was done with the music biz after writing 'Call on Me.' The song felt like her last shot at success after spending years trying to make it as a songwriter.

Spotify charts 2017 songs