Our latest issue of Sandbox went out to subscribers last night. In the cover feature, we look at how playlists marketing has gone through upheaval in recent months as the two biggest players (Apple Music and Spotify) take very different approaches to what playlists are and how they work. Weekly playlists are now squaring up with daily playlists; exclusive playlists on Apple Music are trying to steal a march on enhanced playlists on Spotify; and music-centric playlists are fighting for users’ attention with podcasts (“podlists”?). We speak to a range of marketers and playlist experts about how playlists are evolving on the leading DSPs and what the impact of this evolution will be on their marketing plans. “We have to go back and do it in the old-fashioned way, where we create a buzz outside and try to focus on building actual fans who go onto Spotify and search for that actual record and play it, much more than relying on playlists,” says one executive in Scandinavia where the changes in playlists are being most keenly felt. If the most developed streaming market in the West is seeing all the old certainties being thrown out of the window, it might not be long until other markets are facing down their own existential crisis with regards to playlists. Read the issue here.
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