We’re not sure how well-known Fearne Cotton is outside the UK: in Music Ally’s homeland she’s become a familiar face and voice through her TV and radio broadcasting. Now she’s become the latest curator on Apple Music. This is a proper partnership: Cotton is maintaining four different playlists on the streaming service, which is promoting them as it does other playlists from external brands.
My Happy Place promises “all the feels”; Favourites focuses on her older faves; Workout is more up-tempo; and Cookout is a playlist designed for, yes, the kitchen. Meanwhile, Cotton’s podcast (Happy Place) is proving popular on iTunes.
This is very much a UK-relevant story, but there’s a point that applies more widely: Apple’s interest in striking this kind of partnership up with individuals to guest-curate: putting faces to playlists. That is one of the contrasts to Spotify, where the playlist brand tends to be the focus, rather than the person who curates it – artist-takeovers aside. Could that change? We wonder if, in the same way that there’s currently a land-grab to get podcasters onto music-streaming platforms, there might at some point be similar competition for celebrity playlist-curators. And in that case, people from the radio and TV worlds will be in demand.
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