“It’s not just one-dimensional, you can’t just be on a streaming platform and sit there and make playlists.” Elise Cobain, Playlist Programming and Curation Manager at Filtr, Sony, discusses the brand at a time of heightened observation on the sect

12 August 2016 - Editorial

"Suddenly we feel like we’re in the middle of this melting pot where everyone is looking for their tracks to be on one of the playlists. The thing is, you really have to think about how these things happen. You can’t come with a tiny track, you have to plan the playlist part into the wider strategy, not just dive right in.” Elise Cobain, Playlist Programming and Curation Manager at Filtr, is telling us what it’s like to run a playlist recommendation brand within a major label. And Sony’s Filtr is a shining example.

Having started life as a standalone Swedish brand, Filtr was brought into Sony four years ago as part of an ongoing strategy to get ahead in the burgeoning world of playlisting. Since inception, it’s accumulated 33m+ followers across its portfolio, amasses 200m+ streams worldwide per month and its team have curated in excess of 6,300 playlists. All this totalled together tags it as the largest third party presence on Spotify – although it’s active on 12 services – with 8% of the total streaming market there. For any label, these kinds of stats are becoming a major goal. The power wielded by high traction playlists has been touted around for months, yet it wasn’t until recent events that they came under the spotlight in the mainstream press.

It was Drake’s 15-week No.1 chart run that kick started a wider conversion, eventually leading to questions being asked around how the Official Chart Company effectively reflects streaming consumption in our 60-year-old chart. At the centre of the debate are playlists following Head of Music at Radio 1 and 1Xtra, Chris Price, speaking to NME, the very publication that started the charts, and likening Spotify playlists to radio and suggesting changes to the formula in order to bring the two inline. Whilst that conversation continues, getting subscriber ears on playlists shifts up a gear and solidifies itself as a crucial part of new marketing.

The playlisting game is set on a rapidly moving playing field. A few short years ago playlists almost universally matched physical compilations on the shelves: best sellers, genre-themed collections and many, many ‘chill out’ sessions. But in a sea of competition, and data, the teams behind them are having to get smart. “Context and mood is the new priority. It’s not about having house playlists, it’s about trying to find those quirky words” Cobain explains to us. Teams are expected to keep up with the fast-paced world of on-trend colloquialisms in order to keep on top of the core 15-19 user base streaming platforms are attracting. “I think playlists have now almost taken an urban dictionary approach, but it’s a balance. You’re trying to balance the playlist concept with the name and the artwork versus what people are going to search for. When you open your Apple Music or your Deezer you’re not searching for a specific dance subgenre, you’re searching cooking or running. You have to work out whether you keep it safe so it’s really searchable or really unique so that when people find it they have a deeper connection with it.”

“In my team now there’s a lot of talk about the user experience, not just track by track but how things look – that tiny thumbnail has to be visible – and also the marketing.” Cobain explains that playlist teams are no longer working in isolation, going through new releases and combing archive catalogue tracks but planning wider strategies around social content, giveaways and in some territories even partnering with festival stages. “The entire marketing team are really keen to work with us and are coming up with ideas. My radio background means that I’m not just thinking about what you hear and what you see but also what we can put with it on Facebook or what we can give out at events. It’s not just one-dimensional, you can’t just be on a streaming platform and sit there and make playlists.”

Cobain’s background is a familiar one in the streaming/ playlisting world, having spent over five years as a producer with Radio 1 and 1Xtra before moving over to streaming this year. You can understand why the likes of Zane Lowe, George Ergatoudis, Austin Daboh and more are moving too. The parallels between the platforms have been discussed at length and the expertise the radio squad have honed are the closet set of matching skills the industry has for this new sector, making them a valuable workforce. One of the areas the radio clan have been au fait with for many years is data, and streaming is thriving on it. “You can get lost in the data but it’s really important to balance it with your gut instinct. I think that’s why I’ve come onboard because I’ve had that experience in radio. You have to think about what you’re loving, then think about the story behind the artist and where they are in their campaign, what’s happening on Shazam and online. Initially though it’s still about whether we love it and whether we can see it working for us.” On top of the job coming naturally to those who have made the move, the numbers are attractive as well, as Cobain admits the “tens of millions of listening hours per month” would be a dream come true in radio. “We do realise that we are an amazing business tool for people to use, we can help put a track in front of millions of people – more so than radio” she tells us. “The amount of reach we have and the amount of visibility we can give someone by putting them of certain playlists is mental.”

Despite Filtr being a powerful brand under the Sony umbrella Cobain is quick to explain that it’s her audience that come first: “The crux of it is that Filtr started as its own unique brand and it’s been brought in-house, some people are aware of that and if you really dug into that you’d see a lot of Sony artists in the playlists but our playlists aren’t ‘Newest Sony Releases’ or ‘Trending Sony Releases’ they’re things like ‘Epic Road Trip’ or ‘Rave Time’ -  that’s the kind of image we want to project. We’re there for your mood, it just so happens that Sony is our parent company.” 

Of course Sony artists have an advantage on Filtr, just as Warner artists will on Topsify and Universal artists will on the This Is/ Digster playlists but the strategy behind the brand goes much deeper than simply showcasing the major’s roster. “People do [pitch to us] but we have strategies and each playlist has its own DNA. There will be some tracks that have to fit certain key performance indicators and that’s not because we’re sitting there on top of our mountain, it’s because we have a duty to our audience. We have a brand and a persona that people expect to experience every time they come back. We would never put an unknown artist in our Top 50 playlist [showcasing the biggest global tracks] for the same reason you couldn’t have an unknown artist on the Radio 1 A List – that’s not what people expect and that’s not why it exists.” 

The pressure is on for Cobain and her team to keep up the good work at Filtr following data reporting that compilation sales were down 21% in Q2. The slow down in sales has largely been attributed to streaming’s growth and more specifically to playlists. However, Filtr believes there’s a bigger beast to tackle on the horizon. “It’s not like compilations are dead, they’ve just changed format and physical will always have a place” Cobain tells us. “I think the next struggle for the industry will be how you engage the over-35s. It’s going to require a huge cultural shift. Our under-30s/20s find playlists natural and we’ve kind of had to move with them. Now it’s a case of putting the content there and trying to find a way to get the older generations to come to it.”

And how will that happen? The trouble with, and perhaps also the allure of, the streaming world is that it’s uncharted ground. There’s no blueprint, there’s no history, there are no test subjects, we are well and truly in the infant stages of this area. Cobain concurs: “The thing with playlisting in general is that we have to try. It’s never going to be an exact science and no one knows the answer. At radio they’ve got 50+ years of experience of what might work, they can liaise with the music industry to see if it might work, they get feedback whereas this is such a young industry and there’s so much we don’t know. It’s such a learning curve and no one has cracked it, and they wont tomorrow or next week…”