Playlists Are Drawing More and More Attention. Will They Remake the Music Industry the Way Singles Once Did?

From how artists are made to how music travels to how people listen, the playlist has changed every link in the chain.

welphen still remembers the first time a playlist he made showed up in NetEase Cloud Music's homepage recommendations.

In October 2015, after the electronic music magazine DJ Mag published its annual Top 100 DJs ranking, welphen figured he might as well build a playlist so his fans could see the list in a more direct form. welphen is a diehard electronic music fan. By uploading tracks he had paid to download from outside China's firewall to his radio station on NetEase Cloud Music, and by putting playlists together whenever he had time, he had already gathered close to five figures of followers on the platform.

Soon after he uploaded it, something surprising happened. The same day the playlist went live, NetEase CEO William Ding shared it in his feed. Maybe it was Ding's share that set the thing going: the save count and the comment count climbed by the second. It was the first time welphen had seen anything like it since he started making playlists on NetEase Cloud Music.

welphen posted about it on WeChat Moments, a little pleased with himself. A few friends soon piled into the comments: "Ooh, an internet celebrity now, are we."

The internet celebrity of two years ago now counts as a KOL (key opinion leader) in China's electronic music scene. His NetEase Cloud Music account, @welphenEDM, has gathered 300,000 followers — more than Wu Mochou, who came out of The Voice of China. The 135 playlists welphen has made have been saved 2.5 million times between them. His inbox still holds plenty of invitations from brands and commercial campaigns.

Gathering fans simply by publishing playlists, and turning that into offers of commercial work: a few years ago, the opportunities welphen has had would have looked unimaginable. But with the arrival of streaming, the playlist's influence now reaches every part of the industry. The most obvious change is that the music business's power to decide what gets heard has passed, in the form of the playlist, into ordinary hands. As with the single years ago, the power of the traditional record companies has eroded further.

The playlist is nothing new. In a way, its arrival simply continues the music industry's drift toward fragments. From the appearance of the mp3 to Apple's launch of iTunes, that drift only grew stronger. iTunes broke the album of the record era into singles and sold them one by one; fans no longer had to buy a whole album, only pay for the songs they loved.

The playlist showed up at roughly the same time. In 2003, two years after it launched, iTunes announced it was adding a playlist feature. But playlists did not become mainstream — and did not seem to get much attention — until streaming took over the market. The feature was mentioned in passing when iTunes released its Windows version; the word "playlist" appeared four times in the official press release.

Streaming changed everything. NetEase Cloud Music, Xiami and QQ Music at home, Spotify and Apple Music abroad — all of them made playlists visible, on the page and in search results.

For a streaming service, whether it uses PGC (professionally generated content) to help users find music or UGC (user-generated content) to let users try curating themselves, the playlist is a weapon for holding on to people and standing apart. Personalized recommendations became the choice every platform arrived at on its own. And unlike the cloud-jukebox services abroad, Chinese platforms also gave the playlist a social side: comments and sharing make it spread.

The numbers show how popular playlists have become. In 2015 the digital-music research firm MIDiA Research surveyed 1,500 people in the United States, Britain and France about how they listen. Twenty-nine percent said the album was their main way of consuming music; 31% said the playlist. On streaming services, where users are younger and quicker to follow trends, the gap was wider: 31% mainly listened to albums, while almost half, 45%, got their music mainly through playlists.

As the playlist became the mainstream way to consume music, how it would reshape the industry turned into a question people watched closely. Every cultural product is changed by the channel that carries it, and the music business is not short of precedent.

According to a report in The Guardian, in 2003, before the digital music that iTunes stood for had caught on in Britain, singles sold 30.8 million copies that year and albums sold 157 million. By 2012, singles sales had reached 189 million while album sales had fallen to 100 million. People were no longer listening to albums; they were picking out the songs they liked.

That changed how musicians sold themselves. The promotional stretch around each album release grew longer and longer, with artists dropping a new single every so often and shooting a video for almost every song. Letting a couple of lead singles pull a whole album along no longer worked. Every track had to be looked after.

Now it is streaming and the playlist's turn to shake the music industry.

Record companies began attacking the playlist in force. In 2011 Universal Music started a playlist brand called Digster, playable on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. The other two majors have staked their claim on streaming platforms too: Warner Music's is Topsify, Sony's is Filtr.

In 2014 Warner Music Group bought Playlists.net through WEA, its artist and label services arm. One of the better-known products of this third-party streaming playlist brand is Playlist A Day, a new personalized music app that delivers a high-quality playlist, updated daily, straight to the phones of Spotify subscribers; the picking is done by Playlists.net's editorial team.

"Look at this year's numbers — a bit over 20% of playlists come from Spotify itself or from partner record companies, while 40% to 50% are collections users build themselves and add to their own libraries," said Justin Barker, founder of Slice Music, a digital-marketing consultancy for music streaming platforms, at the 2016 Midem music industry conference.

Buying a place on a playlist has appeared too, much as paying for radio airplay once did. A marketing manager at a major label said: "Paying to get into playlists is where this is inevitably going." Others say the popular playlists have already been bought up. But Glassnote Records said: "We've heard the rumors, but we haven't got hard evidence."

Climbing the charts by playlist is not cheap. A playlist with tens of thousands of followers might be priced at $2,000, while one with more followers can run close to $10,000 for a single song. It is hard to find any official document that supports the practice, but it is not illegal.

In China, the big internet platforms prefer to talk about how the playlist helps users discover music. NetEase Cloud Music now has more than a dozen operations staff working on playlists alone.

NetEase Cloud Music invites celebrities to run radio stations. Plenty of them also make recommendations in playlist form, which they see as a new way to talk to fans. But compared with the way record companies abroad use playlists to promote acts, NetEase Cloud Music told QDaily that it has no deep collaborations with musicians around playlists yet, or anything else of that sort.

On this point, China — where playlist culture looks just as developed — is in fact behind. Abroad there are already good examples of using a playlist to make a musician famous.

The New Zealand singer Lorde and the Irish singer Hozier have gained the most from Spotify's playlists. Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster, put Lorde's songs on his Hipster International playlist and paved her way to international fame; 46% of the first plays of Hozier's tracks came through playlists or through browsing.

Sammy Andrews, a director at Entertainment Intelligence, which analyzes music industry data, thinks the playlist has greatly increased the exposure and play counts of obscure songs and of old singles that were never digitized. "A good example: a single on a small indie label landed on a lot of yoga and sleep playlists, its plays exploded, and the royalties came pouring in. My God, the royalty income from one sleep playlist alone was already frightening."

The rise of the playlist has also created more openings for people like welphen, who specialize in making them. When he started, welphen, like many others, did it purely out of personal love. The social side of the playlist got him and his brand known to more people. But as welphen turned into a KOL-type figure, the way he saw himself changed.

"Early on I defined it — welphenEDM — as me personally, but as more and more people followed welphenEDM, I gradually came to see it as a platform for promoting electronic music in China," welphen said.

welphen is not doing this alone anymore. He has a team now: two people including himself run the NetEase Cloud Music account, and another friend looks after the WeChat official account they opened at the end of last November.

When Ultra, the internationally known electronic music festival, announced at its main Miami event this March that it was coming to China, welphen immediately started writing about the news, wanting more electronic music fans to hear about it right away.

Streaming has let people like welphen build more and more influence as individuals. Once that influence reaches a certain size, commercial interests come in with it. None of this happened back in the album or single era.

welphen told QDaily that he has indeed received plenty of offers to work with brands or promote them. But he stressed that he will only pick partners he and his fans approve of. If the content is good enough, he says, he will spread the word without being asked.

Ultra was exactly that kind of content. What he did not expect was that Ultra would hold out the olive branch itself. After it announced a China edition, its operator on the ground in China — Wang Sicong's Banana Project — came to welphen wanting to work on the event together.

welphen says the platform still needs him to put his own money in from time to time, but he has other plans for the future, "so for now I'm not going to worry about what I gain or lose right away."

If a KOL like welphen still sits relatively far downstream in the music industry, the musicians who write the songs have begun adjusting how they work with the playlist in mind too.

"Did Nicki Minaj Just Kill the Album?" The Atlantic exclaimed in 2012, after Nicki Minaj released Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.

The reason for the alarm: the 19 tracks sounded less like an "album" than like a "playlist." The first half ran in Nicki Minaj's usual vicious hip-hop style, recognizable as hers on the first listen. The second half turned into club music, made by the team behind a number of Lady Gaga and Rihanna hits. Catchy songs, but hard to connect with Nicki Minaj at all.

A review on Fact put it this way: this is not a classic album, but it quietly makes the case that the whole idea of the classic album had stopped mattering by 2012. In this era, fans would rather pick the songs they like straight out of an iTunes library or a Spotify playlist. So what matters is that your EP speaks to every kind of fan; unimportant details, such as whether the tracks flow into one another, do not.

The Los Angeles Times pointed out that Nicki Minaj's approach was nothing new — artists in recent years have all adopted similar strategies. Katy Perry's team carried it off perfectly on Teenage Dream, and Adele's 21 kept the strategy going, releasing singles one after another over a year or two. Only this way can an artist get the most out of a music industry full of unknowns.

In producer Diplo's words, the goal for albums from now on is to make every song feel like a single. With playlists on top, albums may also shrink to around half an hour — a length within which people can more easily stay with a record and hear it through.

The approach has stirred some argument inside the industry. Record companies and artists alike have said that the album is a complete form of presentation, and that a playlist assembled out of singles may have a theme or a logic of its own but damages what the artist set out to do.

One record company boss once said: "Albums may not sell now, but we still promise our musicians we'll put albums out for them, because it isn't only the best form for presenting their work — it has value in several other ways as well."

The bassist of the Hong Kong indie band David Boring says the songs on an album do a better job of showing what a musician wants to do within a given stretch of time, because many ideas cannot be finished in a single song. And a whole album is usually one large idea, expressed through different songs.

But the playlist looks set to press on for a while yet.

That is because the streaming industry, which treats the playlist as its own, keeps getting better — good enough to pull the whole music industry along with it. According to an RIAA report, the music industry's revenue in 2016 grew 11.4% over 2015. That was the first double-digit growth the American music industry had seen since 1998. Streaming brought in $3.93 billion in 2016, up 69% from $2.33 billion the year before. Streaming's take in 2016 was larger than downloads, CDs and vinyl combined, which came to $3.51 billion.

As noted above, every link in the music industry seems to have found its own rhythm for adapting to the playlist, and its own way of using it. Playlists have also opened up new ways to join with other industries: Starbucks puts out a weekly curated playlist on Spotify, and passengers on Virgin America flights can use Spotify free. The closed music industry of the pre-playlist era could not have managed any of this.

Since the single-driven days of iTunes, people have grown used to consuming music in pieces, and it has gradually become something that plays alongside whatever else you are doing. You spend more and more time listening, but apart from a new record by an artist you love, when was the last time you sat down and listened to a whole album through? You probably have headphones on while doing homework, running, working out or gaming — but what is coming through your streaming service isn't an album. It's more like an "efficient homework background playlist" or a "gaming essentials playlist," isn't it?

Title and in-text images from: Public Domain Pictures, Wiki Commons, Pexels