One Direction are the latest artist to take over one of streaming music service Spotify’s popular playlists, with a two-day long promotion that kicks off tomorrow (6 February).
The boy-band will be put in charge of Spotify’s Teen Party playlist, with fans being promised “the boys’ own personal song choices, exclusive shoutouts and some big surprises”.
They’re also being invited to make their own suggestions for songs to be added to the playlist during the 48-hour takeover. This being One Direction, that process is happening on Twitter, with fans tweeting their requests and the hashtag #1D2D.
(One Direction Two Days, geddit? #Marketing…)
Anyway, One Direction – SCREAM! – but the wider trend here is playlists as music marketing tools. Teen Party is already one of the most popular playlists on Spotify, with more than 970,000 followers at the time of writing – and likely quite a few more by this weekend.
Labels are increasingly keen to get their new tracks onto popular playlists, and indeed, the three major labels all have their own dedicated playlist divisions to create their own collections that fans will subscribe to. Warner Music even bought startup Playlists.net to bolster its team in this area.
Why? Once someone subscribes to a playlist in Spotify, it appears in their Your Music section of the Spotify apps, and they’ll be notified when new tracks are added to it. As more people spend more time streaming music, these playlists are going to become ever-more-important marketing channels for the industry.
Takeovers too. One Direction are just the latest artist to take over a Spotify playlist, following in the footsteps of Pitbull, Tiesto, and Ariana Grande – she also took over the Teen Party playlist for a weekend in September 2014.
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