🔮How Does The Future Of Playlist Pitching Look Like? Meet Playlister.Club
We sat down and had an interesting chat with Danny Garcia from Playlister.Club, a music discovering platform we've been successfully using to reach music curators and playlisters.
One night I had a dream… A dream about having unrestricted access to all the knowledge and information in the world at a click of a button… Oh, wait, we already have access to the world wide web, so basically I am living my dream as we speak.
But then again, be careful what you wished for, as it might become reality. A reality where information is flooding our senses in an overwhelming manner. Put this into the musical industry context and you got yourself literally millions of curators, playlists, DSPs’, channels, promo agencies and social media platforms eagerly waiting to devour your music and eventually your hard earned money, promising you’d become a star overnight.
If you explored at least a bit the process of pitching your music to independent playlisters, you know that results are pretty low compared to the time consuming effort you spent doing this. And this is true the other way around: playlisters need to manage a huge amount of music submissions on a daily business. Luckily for us (and you!), someone out there thought of putting some order in the infomational chaos we’re living in. Playlister.club, a platform where you can submit your music to curators, has taken a different path. Rather than being a submission or pitching tool, Playlister.club stands as a playlister toolset, revolutionizing how playlisters find new music and create better playlists. It’s a hybrid between AI powered algorithms and human driven curation, making the process a walk in the park for both the playlisters and the artists. Just add your music to the platform, tag the musical genre as close to the reality as possible and watch how the magic happens. Your music will eventually find its right place in the right playlists.
We felt the need to explore Playlister.club in a bit more depth, so we challenged Danny Garcia, one of the founders, to tell us more about the platform, setting the discussion into the context of nowaday’s music scene. Enjoy!
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Since when is music an integral part of your life?
I have been playing guitar since I was in the 2nd grade! Eventually, I got into Youtube tutorials where I learned about all genres and styles of playing. Throughout high school, I produced music with my indie rock band out of my garage, and I eventually ended up at NYU Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music to study music production & business. It’s been a life-long journey for me!
How did you come up with the idea of creating Playlister.club?
I have been in the playlisting space for +6 years, working at various marketing agencies, as a freelancer, and at distributors. I was intrigued by playlists, and recognized they were quickly becoming an essential part of the music industry and music consumption ecosystem, but felt the true power of playlists hadn’t been harnessed yet. There were no reliable or affordable ways for emerging artists to reach playlists that were real. Combining my experiences with the rest of my co-founders, we developed the model for Playlister.Club and launched an early version of the product in 2019, tailored towards playlisters first, and then artists & labels.
Please describe a bit more in depth Playlister. What does it bring new to the playlist pitching table, with all these pitching services available right now?
Playlister.Club is unique because we are not a “submission” or “pitching” tool, where you send songs directly to playlisters. We also are not an “agency” where you pay a large sum of money for someone to represent you. We are a music discovery platform. In practice, what this means is that we have an algorithm that matches your song in the feeds of playlisters. We provide a Netflix-style feed for every playlister that uses our ecosystem, based off of what they listen to and add to their playlists. Playlisters can interact with any of the thousands of songs in our ecosystem, rather than sort through submissions that were sent to them. The same way you discover new shows or movies when browsing Netflix, our playlisters can explore through a pool of new releases, and interact with music they actually like. This allows playlisters to curate amazing playlists that their listeners love, and allows the best music to bubble up to the top!
Is Playlister limited to specific music genres?
We have +85K playlists spanning all kinds of moods, genres, activities. Though more commercial genres tend to fare better when it comes to results.
What’s in for the playlisters using Playlister.club?
We are the most advanced playlisting toolset out there, with a bunch of amazing features to manage your playlists and find new music like:
Song Scheduler to schedule music into your playlists that will automatically delete after a certian amount of time.
Song Trading Marketplace so you can swap your music into other playlists with thousands of listeners
Song Chat - to connect directly with other curators
A&R partnership program - to monetize your curation and get paid to create amazing playlists .
…. and more — all completely for free!
What’s the science behind the Playlistability tool?
Our *Playlistability* feature uses different metrics like release date, BPM, Acousticness, Danceability, and the list goes on and on! When you check the playlistability of a song, we compare this list of metrics to the averages from what our playlister community is currently adding to their playlists on that day. The overall score is determined with how aligned the song is, compared to the average metrics of what all the playlisters are adding.
What criterias do you use when selecting various playlists and curators for Playlister?
We have a very intense vetting process for curators, to ensure we partner with real people that align with our mission to promote real curation. We look at growth charts, streaming cities, and whole slew of other data. If they pass the data vetting portion, we then ask them how they grow their playlists directly. They need to provide screenshots of any marketing activities they partake in for their playlists, and more. To give you an idea, we accept less than 50% of the curators that apply to our partner program.
Cold emailing vs using a playlist pitching service…
Cold emailing can be effective, though you need to spend a ton of time researching, and vetting playlisters to ensure you are reaching the right playlister. You can use our Playlister Profiles on Playlister.Club which helps you save a ton of time when researching these curators, that will give you unique insights on each playlister.
Do you think that playlisting could be a full-time job?
Definitely! We founded the company under the shared belief that playlisters are the music industry’s new A&Rs. We saw a big opportunity to help legitimize playlisters in the traditional industry, by empowering them with technology, access to amazing new music, and monetization opportunities. I would like to think we are making more of an impact every day on this front, to ensure playlisters get the attention the deserve!
Spotify radically changed the way we listen to music and actually changed the way music is created. How will the digital music scene look in 5 years from now?
I believe that the marketing, or “post-creative” side of the digital music landscape has not been democratized yet. For perspective, look at the “creative” side. You can make amazing-sounding music from home, with a few-hundred dollars worth of gear, master it via an AI, and distribute it for basically nothing — But what about after distribution? Music creators have no real growth levers to pull that are affordable and effective; and that is where we are positioning our efforts as a company. We hope to leverage technology and automation to make the “post-creative” process for artists cheap, easy, and effective, so they can focus on making music. I believe that in 5 years, the marketing side of the digital music scene will be much more democratized than it is today, allowing music creators to go “direct to listener” rather than just uploading and praying the algorithm will pick them up. I predict that the digital music solutions that arise in the next 5 years will allow artists and listeners to connect in a much more direct, and accessible way.
Apart from this, what do you do for a living?
Nothing else! This is my main and only gig :)
Tell us an artist we should keep an eye on in the coming months.
I have been vibing on this deep island funk cut. Not very new, but definitely a song to jam out to throughout your summer 🙂