What Drives Demand for Playlists on Spotify? (Pachali & Datta, 2024)

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, where today we dive into the world of music, data, and Spotify playlists. Imagine over 30,000 playlists, each vying for your attention, each hoping to land on your daily soundtrack. But what drives people to follow these playlists? Is it the allure of big-name artists or something else entirely? In this episode, we explore groundbreaking research that looks at two key factors: being featured on Spotify’s Search Page and including tracks from major label superstars. The findings? Getting your playlist featured on the Search Page can boost daily followers by nearly 1%, a jump that’s double the impact of simply adding a hit song by a popular artist. This brings up some major questions about how Spotify’s algorithms might be steering us. Is the platform giving certain playlists an unfair advantage by highlighting them in prime real estate? And how much do those star-studded tracks actually matter in the battle for followers? As we unravel this, let’s ask—how much of your listening is guided by discovery, and how much is curated for you by forces you can’t even see? Reference Max J. Pachali, Hannes Datta (2024) What Drives Demand for Playlists on Spotify?. Marketing Science. Published online in Articles in Advance 18 Sep 2024. Paper link https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.0273 Thanks to Marketing Science to make this paper open access. Marketing Science is an ABDC A* and FT50 listed academic journal published by INFORMS.