Music fans are increasingly relying on playlists to discover their new favorite music.
Pexels.comConsider your current favorite song, the one you can’t stop listening to. How did you discover it?
Before the digital revolution, music discovery happened through a blend of fate and coincidence—like turning on the radio at the right time or picking up a new sampler CD at the indie record store. Somehow, that brand-new melody and those unheard lyrics sounded incredibly familiar, connecting on an emotional level as exactly the song you needed to hear. But with streaming platforms taking over mainstream listening, the magic of discovery is now in the method itself.
French streaming service Deezer launched in the United States late last year and is now in more than 180 countries, is making discovery a prime focus of their service. Most recently, they launched a new program called Deezer Next, designed to promote emerging artists with editorial and marketing support to better connect them to listeners.
I spoke with Jorge Rincon, Deezer VP of North America, about the new program to get a sense of how the platform is looking to connect users to their next favorite song. Unsurprisingly, he says data is key.
“We constantly look at what are emerging trends, genres, songs, artists by looking at what consumers are starting to listen to and request and search for,” Rincon said. “We looked at those trends and spotted new upcoming artists that could truly benefit from the exposure.”
Rincon describes Deezer Next as a win-win—the artists get more visibility, and fans get more of what they want. An initial crop of artists spans the platform's most popular genres from pop to country to Latin to hip-hop.
Deezer’s three globally marketed artists include singer-songwriters Anne-Marie, Rag'n’Bone Man and Maggie Rogers. Five artists who will be supported in the United States include Latin pop and reggaeton singer Sofia Reyes, rapper, songwriter and producer Jidenna, Mexican singer Christian Nodal, Atlanta-bred rapper Dae Dae and country crooner Lauren Alaina.
Through placing these artists on strategically chosen playlists and supporting them with editorial content, Rincon said Deezer hopes to connect the music directly to its likely fans. While listeners used to discover new music through a combination of terrestrial radio and record stores, now it’s about the genre or mood-based playlist, Rincon said.
Like other streaming platforms, Deezer has also developed a way to directly tap into users’ listening habits in order to personalize their playlists. The “Flow” feature uses a proprietary algorithm that seeks to blend old favorites with new ones. Users select genres and artists that begin to populate an ever-changing playlist based on related recommendations and user choices.
Deezer allowed me to sample this service before writing about so I could see how it worked. So if I keep passing over Ed Sheeran, Alessia Cara and pop tunes, Flow's next picks might lean more toward the pop punk bands I selected and play more Real Friends and Knuckle Punk.
Like other data-driven services, the more you use it, the better the algorithm gets at predicting what you want to hear. Flow, Rincon said, speaks to two types of listeners out there: the ones that want to listen exactly what they like and are more likely to create their own playlist, and the kind who want to discover something new by picking curated playlists.
“We’re continually understanding what you like and what you don’t like, and we create these personal soundtracks,” he said.
From a business perspective, smart streaming is a smart bet. The Record Industry Association of America reports that 34% of U.S. music revenues came from streaming in 2015, the largest component of industry revenues that year and more than five times the 7% chunk of overall revenue streaming contributed in 2010.
RIAA also says paid subscriptions emerged in 2016 as the primary revenue driver for the music industry. At the halfway mark last year, RIAA reported streaming accounted for 47% of all recorded music revenues, compared to 31% for permanent downloads and 20% for physical copies.
The popularity shows few signs of waning. Spotify, for example, made headlines with its 50 million paid subscriber milestone in late February. Though the news was largely framed as a Spotify vs. Apple Music rivalry, Deezer’s Rincon says there’s enough room in the market for multiple global players, especially given how the industry is still evolving.
“There’s a long way to go for streaming,” he said. “Eight months ago, we would still be scratching our heads whether music streaming was truly the next way of delivering content.”
Whatever the future holds, it’s likely to get a lot more personalized. The way we discover our next favorite songs will feel a little less like destiny pulling the strings and a lot more like data picking up on our habits. But hey, if we get to hear the right song, at the right time, who can argue with that?
