In the mid-2010s, the power of the playlist—Spotify's playlist to be exact—loomed large in the music industry: Everyone knew that a spot on Rap Caviar could cut a rap hit overnight. a placement on Fresh Finds could spark a tag bidding war. And a lower-than-expected New Music Friday ranking could ruin a record project manager's Thursday night.
But in the 2020s, challengers — namely TikTok, with its powerful and mysterious algorithm that serves up social media users with addicting snippets of songs while scrolling — threatened Spotify's reign as king of the music industry. However, Spotify's editorial playlists remain one of the most important means of promoting music, and its global team of 100+ members, led by its global head of editorial Sulinna Onghas evolved to meet the changing times.
“Our curation expertise is both an art and a science,” says Ong, who has led the company in its recent efforts to use technology to offer more personalized playlist options, such as DJ AI, Daylist and daily mixes . “We're always thinking about how we can introduce you to your next favorite song to your next favorite artist. How do we provide the context to get you engaged? Today, the challenge is to cut through the noise to get noticed.”
In conversation with Bulletin boardOng talks about training DJ AI with editors' human expertise, using playlists to differentiate Spotify from its competition, and looking ahead to Generation Alpha (ages 0-14).
I've seen such a shift in editorial strategy at Spotify over the past couple of years. List of the day, personalized editorial playlists (tagged “made for you”), daily mixes, AI DJ and more. These inspired your team to promote these personalized editorial playlists?
To start, it's helpful to zoom out and think about how people listen to music. The way people listen to music is fluid and curation and editorial should be fluid as well. We need to understand the changes.
Curators have always been at the core of Spotify's identity, since the company's early days. In 2012, Spotify's music team started with three editors and quickly grew to more than 100 worldwide today. These curators began by curating what became known as iconic editorial playlists — Today's Top Hits, Rap Caviar, Viva Latino. Over time it expanded to playlists like Altar, Lorem, Pollen, etc. All of these are still important.
But around 2018, editors made their first attempts to bridge human curation from our iconic editorial playlists with personalization engines. 2018 is the year that technology emerged with personalization and machine learning to open up these possibilities. Around that time, we started making more personalized playlists where the tracks fit an overall mood or moment curated by the editors, but differed for each listener — like My Life Is A Movie, Beastmode, Classic Roadtrip Songs. The editors will select a number of songs that they think fit this playlist. Let's say, for example, that we have selected 200 songs, you might see the 100 of them that match your taste the most.
Discover Weekly and Release Radar are tailored to listener activity and have been around for a long time. Did these inspire your team to push these personalized editorial playlists around 2018?
Yes, exactly. Algorithmic playlists like Release Radar [and] Discover Weekly, we found that users liked them [and] this inspired us to then work with the product teams and ask, “What's the next step?” Spotify has more than 500 million users. We knew it would continue to grow and as a human curator, you can't manually curate the entire tank. Technology can fill this gap and increase our capabilities. A lot of times, I see narratives where people call it a dichotomy – whether playlists are human-made or machine-made. We don't see it that way.
In 2024, personalization and machine learning are even more important technologies for streaming music and watching content. We've continued to invest in cutting-edge personalization, and it's making a real impact — 81% of our listeners cite personalization as their favorite thing about Spotify. Static editorial playlists are still very powerful, but we've also built these other listening experiences to complete the picture.
How one listens is never one thing. Do you only want to watch movies? No, you want to watch a movie sometimes. other times you want to watch a 20-minute TV show. We need to understand the different ways you can like it [listen].
Daylist, for example, is very ephemeral. It only exists for a certain amount of time. The appeal is in the title – it also appeals to a younger audience.
Did your team always intend that Daylist, which often gives users crazy titles like “Whimsical Downtown Vibes Tuesday Evening,” would be shareable—even noteworthy—on social media?
Absolutely. It's very communal. It's a piece of everyday joy that you can post online.
It reminds me of the inherently shareable nature of Spotify Wrapped.
There is an origin there. It is similar because it is a reminder of what you hear. But it's repackaged in a humorous way — light and fun and updated to keep people coming back.
How do you think Spotify's editorial team differentiates itself from competitors like Apple and Amazon?
Early on, we understood that editorial expertise around the world is truly valuable and needed to set us apart. So we have editors all over the world. They are truly the musical experts of the group. They focus on understanding the music and cultural scenes where they are.
We have what we call a “publishing philosophy”. One of the tenets of this is Global Custody Groups, or “GCG” for short. Once a week, editors from around the world meet and identify pieces that are doing well and should flow from one market to another. We talk about musical trends, artists that excite us. We are talking about new music mainly but also music that is re-emerging from social media trends.
That's how we went about spreading genres like K-pop seven years ago. We've playlisted it and supported its spread around the world. Musica Mexicana and Amapiano — we were early [with those] very. We predicted that streaming would lower barriers to entry in terms of language, so we're seeing genres and artists from non-Western, non-English-speaking countries really make an impact on the global music scene.
How was DJ AI trained to provide the commentary and context it provides?
We essentially created a writers room. We have our editors work with our product team and writers to add some context about the artists and tracks that the DJ can share with listeners. Feed information can be musical facts, culturally relevant information. We want listeners to feel connected to the artists they're listening to on a human level. At the end of the day, this approach to programming also really helps us expand our exposure pool, particularly for unknown artists and tracks. We've seen that people who hear the commentary from the DJ are more likely to listen to a song they would have otherwise skipped.
When Spotify's editorial playlists started, the cool, young, influential audience was millennials. Now it's Gen Z. What challenges did this generational change pose?
We think about this every day in our work. Now, we are even thinking about the next generation after Gen Z, Gen Alpha [children age 14 and younger]. I think the key difference is our departure from genre lines. Where we once had a strictly rock playlist, now we build playlists like POV or My Life Is A Movie. It's a lifestyle or an experience playlist. We also see that younger listeners like to experiment with many different listening experiences. We try to be very playful with our curation and offer these more ephemeral daily playlists.
What are you seeing with Gen Alpha so far? I'm sure many of them are still on their parents' accounts, but do you have any insight into how they might view music differently than other generations as they mature?
Game. The game is really an important space for them. Music is part of how we play games now — in fact, that's how these kids often discover and experience music, especially in Discord and big MMOs — massively multiplayer games. We think a lot about that culture because it's mainstream culture for someone that age.
Gaming is so interesting because it is such a dynamic, controlled medium. Recorded music, however, is completely static. However, there have been a few startups experimenting with music that can morph as you play the game.
Yes, we work to make things playful. There is a gamification in using Daylist, right? It's a habit. You come back because you want to see what's new. We see AI DJ as another way to make music listening more interactive, less static.
Spotify has long been known as a destination for music discovery. Now, listeners are increasingly turning to TikTok and social media for it. How do you ensure music discovery continues on Spotify for its users?
This is, again, due to editorial expertise and the GCGs I mentioned earlier. We have over 100 people whose job it is to be the most leveraged people in terms of what's happening around the world in their genre. That's our biggest strength in terms of discovery because we have a great group of people focused on that. Technology just adds to this human expertise.
When Spotify playlists first became popular, many people compared the editors to the new generation of radio DJs. How do you feel about this comparison?
It's not a one-to-one comparison. I can understand the logic of how some people might get there. But, if I'm quite honest, the editorial work we do is none of our business. Radio DJs, it's all about them, their personality. It's not about them being a DJ or fronting a show. Not to be disparaging about radio DJs – their role is important – it's just not the same thing. I don't think we are gatekeepers. I say that because it's never about me or us as editors. It's about the music, the artist and the audience experience. It's very simple: I want to introduce you to your next favorite song. Yes, we have influence. I recognize that in the industry. It's something I take very seriously. That's a privilege and a responsibility, but ultimately it's not about us.
This story was published as part of Bulletin boardof the new Machine Learning music technology newsletter. Sign up for “Machine Learning” and Bulletin boardother newsletters, here.
