 Spotify playlist study finds major labels have most influence the details. A consulting firm called Music Tomorrow published a study where major labels accounted for nearly 70% of the music featured in the New Music Friday playlist on Spotify. So New Music Friday is the probably one of the most broad and what's called Solicited. Now what I mean by Solicited is I've explained this to the past but major labels and the big distributors find the people who make the choice of who these songs are on and they push them to give them placements. Basically if you're on New Music Friday it means one any money you're paying for that salary is coming right back into you with royalties and then two it really has an effect on breaking artists and that's what their job is to do so it makes a lot of sense for them to do it. It makes sense that you're going to see a playlist like that have a lot of that. I thought this was pretty interesting of that number 30% was Universal Music Group while 19% for Warner and 19% for Sony. Universal's been pretty much killing it in the major label sphere so that's not that shock. Some people would think is like wow it's that much more than the other labels but truly I actually think that it's shocking that they're not a little bit more ahead than them but yet again this kind of goes back to the thing of the soliciting. So when you're trying to keep three relationships happy well you're giving each of them probably an out do share than as opposed to their market share of what is actually on the charts. The major labels share of new music on Spotify playlists like Rap Caviar and Get Turn were even higher in the same period. 86% of new music added those playlists are from artists represented by major labels. Today's top hits and Pop Rising playlists saw 80% of their content come from major labels. Okay so these are the biggest playlists on this platform no doubt about it. So part of why this I don't think is shocking is these playlists really are not where you're going to see an artist who's not established already get added. This is the place for somebody who's really really I wouldn't say a household name yet but they're getting pretty solidified in the genre. It's not going to be your first song that's going to get added here right away. You're going to get added to some of the smaller playlists and so you know in a recent video the one I did on Chartmetric I showed how Chartmetric have these amazing playlist journeys in fact here I can show it. So the playlist journeys of course and if you didn't watch my video on Chartmetric shame on you you're able to see that some playlists people get on first and then they end up on it whereas you could also see if you click look ahead where after they're on a playlist where they end up. So it's an interesting thing that like yes rap caviar you've got to be on a ton of other playlists and then by the time you get there if you're a new artist you probably need to have had that song is going to probably be too old to get on there so it's going to be your next single if that's hot gets on there and so then of course if you have hot singles you're probably getting pursued by A&R especially if it's that big in that genre they're signing people really fast so that'll all make sense but the one thing I want to say that I think is like a little inaccurate about the headline is yes that's true in those big playlists but like a lot of the other playlists that Spotify does that still is not the case like they have so many of these playlists that are all about showcasing unknown artists. So here's a good example this is the playlist I listen to the most on Spotify it's called Hyperpop and as you can see Warner Music has 6% of it Sony has 1.82% which is two whole tracks the playlist and the same thing with UMG and then all of this is mostly DIY artists using their own labels a couple of them like PC music and dog show have a few different artists but truly some of these genres here's the pop punk is not dead so when you look Pure Noise which is probably one of the bigger indies of the genre has just about as enough as as much as Hopeless Records which in Troll of Warner or at least under distribution of Warner I mean actually it says 12% total versus 11.2 for 5% total so like it's pretty negligible and then it's a lot of DIY stuff so I think it's pretty interesting that there's still is huge genre playlist that this is not the case that it's all major label it's more that just this is always an amorphous thing and that every genre changes over depending on what really it is that is the dynamic of the genre because at the end of the day these playlists they have to keep people listening and if the major labels aren't serving them the fresh stuff like in Hyperpop you know it's just not a genre where major labels are signing up artists like crazy so that's why you see it's funny because like really big beat in Atlantic do a lot of the signing in that genre so you see so little representation there because that's just not where the labels are at yet and so this playlist is actually probably one of the least solicitous playlist you'll see so here's the the most interesting part of this article that kind of contradicts the headline as of 2022 Spotify curates about 5,000 frontline official playlists which were assessed in the study music tomorrow notes that the winds of fortune may be changing for in DRs currently April 2022 is an outlier in their data with new music Friday featuring 63% tracks from non major labels that's a shift from previous months where releases from India are as barely broke through 30% of the content featured on new music Friday playlist so if you're not following that thread they're actually saying that Spotify is changing its ways a little bit and start fresh finds I think it's actually interesting that they're trying to go a little bit more DIY indie and this is another thing too so like I have a team in like one of the girls who doesn't work for me we noticed the thing and this is why we took back our anti presave stance that we started to see a lot more artists get added at the two to three week mark now you can actually see this we studied this in chart metric so here's an interesting thing track age before the playlist in the hyper pop one zero to one week and then there's some here but there's almost nothing added in the ones the six months range or the six months range whereas this playlist track age before playlist like a lot of this is it's a slow moving playlist it waits for like artists to get hype around their music all these playlists are a little bit different here in that respect of like how fast they add tracks a lot of this if you want to get added to them it's about building up those streams and your consistent sustained promotion yet again this is another reason why this is in that $10 a month chart metric plan and you can see all this data and if you're targeting certain playlists you can adjust your strategy accordingly since it's so much different from genre to genre