From independent Apple Music playlist curators to Playlist Journeys, we can provide you with the data you need to develop your Apple Music playlist strategy.
by Rutger Ansley Rosenborg chartmetric How Music Charts
There’s no denying Spotify’s dominance when it comes to premium music streaming subscribers. In fact, according to MIDiA Research’s market share model, the top 5 music streaming platforms, by premium subscriber market share, are….
1.Spotify
2. Apple Music
3. Amazon Music
4. Tencent Music
5. YouTube Music
Apple Music, with a 15% market share, is one of the most important DSPs on the global stage. So it’s no surprise that Apple Music playlist curators are important to artists and their teams.
While each DSP has a slightly different playlist organization system, it’s safe to bet on three main categories:
- Editorial: playlists curated by the DSP itself
- Major label: playlists curated by Filtr (Sony Music Entertainment), Digster (Universal Music Group), and Topsify (Warner Music Group)
- Non-editorial or independent curators: playlists curated by other curators, including brands, artists, and everyday users
Typically, the goal is to land on big editorial playlists; however, this is not always easy to do. Partly because DSPs try to keep their editorial playlists very exclusive.
So when crafting your playlist strategy, you want to think bottom-up: Which non-editorial curators can you present your music with a reasonable chance of being placed on one of their playlists? Which playlists feed into other playlists?
A good first step in this process is to check which non-editorial Apple Music playlists place music of a genre similar to yours.
If you go to the list of playlists in Chartmetric and then click on the Apple Music tab, you will see almost 80,000 playlists for which we collect data on each data. To narrow down this list, you can click on the Genre drop-down menu and select the genre that interests you. You will now be able to see all Apple Music playlists containing music in that particular genre, regardless of curator type.
To access non-editorial playlists of a particular genre, click the Playlist Type drop-down menu and select Independent Curators. You will now see all non-editorial Apple Music playlists in the genre you are interested in.
From there, you can click on a particular playlist page to see when the playlist is updated, what subgenres are typically included, what countries most of the artists in that playlist are from, and pretty much every track on it since 2018. .
Now, while we can’t necessarily tell you how to contact Apple Music playlist curators or provide you with a direct line to those curators, we do provide social URLs on individual curator pages. If they have their social media URLs linked, there’s nothing stopping you from DMing them or doing a bit more research to find their website.
According to Indiemono, the largest independent curator of Apple Music playlists:
As independent curators, we receive many songs daily. If you want to stand out between submissions, here are some tips:
- Send it once it’s out: Freelance curators don’t usually have an automatic system for adding songs once they’re out, so if they like your song but it’s not yet exit, there is a good chance that they will forget it.
- Keep it relevant and simple: A good pitch should contain the mood of the song, the genre and a line or two for the description. No more.
- Follow their rules. If a curator has a certain form or system, be sure to follow it and don’t try to cheat. It won’t get you anywhere.
If you want to submit your music to Indiemono, check out this link: https://indiemono.com/music-submit/
And if there’s an editorial playlist you really want to land on, it’s worth navigating to its playlist page, clicking on the Playlist Journeys section, and seeing if any non-editorial playlists have tend to feed this particular playlist. This will give you a pretty good understanding of feed playlists in Apple Music, i.e. smaller playlists that tend to feed larger playlists.
From here, I hope all these non-editorial additions to the Apple Music playlist will get you that editorial playlist you’ve always wanted.