Why Musicians Should Stop Chasing Playlists

For some years now, playlists have been touted to musicians as the promised land. Get on the right playlist, and all is well. Streams will flow. Hits will roll in. Careers flourish. Champagne is likely popping.

The reality of it is this: your track ends up on a playlist, plays a few thousand times for people who don’t know your name, and then.poof! into the cyber ether it vanishes, leaving you where you were when you began but refreshing your stats like a maniac.

It’s not the playlists that are the problem. Playlists are great tools, sometimes astonishingly so. The end isn’t the playlists.

Somewhere along the way, artists were told that playlisting was something to be capitalized on as validation for artistry. As if the measure of success for a piece of music lay in its functionality between another piece hand.selected by an algorithm that fails to know or care who you are.

And that’s when things begin to wobble.

But with playlists as the goal, music itself will start to shift in shape. Songs will be shorter. Intros will be shorter. Choruses will come in sooner than is necessary. Risk will decrease. Texture will be reduced. Everything is designed to be readily pleasing, because that is what will be rewarded by the system.

The payoff? Plenty of nice tunes. Very little memorable music.

Ironically enough, playlists never seem to amass a devoted following. Playlists produce listeners, but not necessarily fans. Listeners will latch onto your song, give a cursory nod of the head in its regard, and then that’s it. There will be no narrative to be told, no context to provide for its meaning. You will only be a fleeting memory within their

Meanwhile, artists are spending months modifying their sound to be accepted into playlists that they will never be able to control and sometimes will never even be aware of when they are removed from them in the first place.

But there’s also a quieter cost. The pursuit of playlists causes artists to doubt their intuition. What’s being asked instead of, “Is this track authentic?” “Is it complete?” is “Will it work on Spotify?” And when that question is in the room, creativity walks out.

This, of course, doesn't mean that playlists are pointless. Playlists can serve to expose new listeners to new sounds. They can contribute to getting new releases out. And yes, they might alter a course of direction. However, they never had to be career-builders.

"The artists who succeed tend to think about something else, such as the establishment of a recognizable sound, storytelling in relation to the work, the performance of gigs that convert audience members to believers, or the delivery of tracks that are complete rather than optimal."

In short, ultimately people will follow artists and not playlists.

So, absolutely, enjoy the benefit that comes with it when it arrives. Enjoy the exposure you get with it. Just don’t build a career or a body of work around something created for background listening purposes.

“Make music that would still matter if playlists didn’t exist at all.” - Andrew Lipham, music producer and songwriter That, quietly, is where the real longevity is.