Perhaps it’s no surprise that given his background as head of music at the BBC’s Radio 1 and 1Xtra, George Ergatoudis refers his new employer Spotify’s playlists as “shows”. But in an interview with Hits Daily Double, the streaming service’s head of shows and editorial for the UK, Australia and New Zealand hinted at plans for these playlist brands to find lives beyond Spotify.
“Some of these shows are going to become brands, which differentiates us from other places to find music, enables discovery and makes life simple for the audience who love having strong curated brands that they can believe in,” said Ergatoudis. “We’ve got ambitions I can’t really talk about too much now, but if you imagine how you might build a brand and then extrapolate it beyond being just on Spotify, that is a really key part of the future for us.”
Ergatoudis also said Spotify is determined to help more emerging artists break through, at the end of a year when there has been a growing swell of unease about the static nature of the charts in countries like the US and UK.
“The plan for our playlist portfolio is to make sure that we are nurturing, finding and helping artists in many different areas and spaces find their audience—and then growing them, enabling them to build new fans and pushing them further and further into the mainstream,” said Ergatoudis. “I’m convinced that Spotify can enable more breakthroughs to happen than have probably ever been possible before, and we are starting to see the beginnings of that.”
He also talked about the charts stasis issue. “There is no doubt that the mass market wants an authentic view into what the most popular tracks in the market are at that point in time. For a while, the industry enjoyed using the chart as a way to break new material. When we are in the streaming world, you need to think about mixing those two things together in a way that’s still authentic enough that the public will actually care.”
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