Spotify wants its editorial and artist and label-relations teams to work “more in alignment” in the future, at least in the Nordic territories: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. That’s according to Johan Seidefors, head of content, Nordic, at Spotify. He was talking in the streaming service’s session at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last week.
Seidefors showed a slide representing the two teams. “On the left, the music, culture and editorial team, and then [on the right] the artist and label marketing team. Each of these functions have their own mission,” he said. “That’s pretty important, to keep them separated. But moving forward, we feel it’s more important for them to work more cross-functional and more in alignment for the artists.”
Music Ally can’t help wondering whether this is partly a response to the kind of criticism voiced by marketing agency Motive Unknown’s founder Darren Hemmings last month at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam. He was talking about pitching to Spotify playlists. “It’s become this comedic dance that doesn’t really mean a lot. There’s a person whose job it is to go to somewhere like Spotify and say ‘We’ve got this new priority and we’d love you to playlist it’. And there’s someone’s job at Spotify in artist or label relations to sit and go ‘That’s amazing, I love that track’,” said Hemmings. “And then at the end of the meeting you ask if you can get playlisted, and they say ‘No! Because we don’t run the playlist, the editorial people do.” Read our full report of Spotify’s by:Larm session here.
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