The Sunset Recorder

Editorial playlist pitching happens through a form. An artist or a manager fills in a submission inside the artist tools that the major services provide, selects one unreleased track, and describes it: genre, mood, instrumentation, language, whether it is a cover, where the artist is based. That form has a deadline measured against the release date, usually several weeks out, and missing it removes the record from editorial consideration. Not from release, from consideration. The record still comes out on schedule and does so unpitched.

The lead time exists because editors work ahead. Playlists are programmed on a cycle, and a curator reviewing submissions is filling slots for a future refresh rather than the current one. This is why delivering to a distributor a week before release is a self inflicted wound. The delivery window has to close before the pitch window opens, so a compressed schedule eliminates the pitch before anyone has heard the song.

Legibility matters as much as timing. A pitch is read by a person with a queue, and the metadata attached to it places the track in a category. Correct genre and mood tagging, accurate writer and producer credits, a clean profile with a current image and biography, and artwork that meets specification all make a record easier to file. None of this makes a mediocre song good. It prevents a good song from being unreadable at the moment it is sorted.

Three different things people call a playlist

The first is editorial. A human being, employed by the service, chooses the tracks. These are the lists with recognisable names and large followings, and placement is a decision made by a person who could have chosen otherwise.

The second is algorithmic personalisation. These surfaces are generated per listener from behaviour, both the individual's and that of listeners with adjacent taste. Nobody is choosing a record for the list, because there is no single list. An engine is deciding, one person at a time, that a track resembles what they already return to.

The third is third party curation: playlists built by users, blogs, agencies and hobbyists, sitting on the same platform but outside its editorial staff. Some carry real audiences and real taste. Many are inflated, and the ones that solicit payment for inclusion are a plain problem. Paid placement violates the terms of every major service, but the commercial argument against it is stronger than the compliance one. Bought listeners have no relationship to the music. They skip early and never return, and the systems reading that behaviour treat it as evidence the record does not hold attention. The purchase makes the record look worse to the machinery that distributes music at scale.

What the systems are reading

Release day behaviour matters because early signals are the only data a new track has. Pre-saves and pre-adds concentrate listening into the first hours, which gives a recommendation engine a population of engaged listeners to learn from rather than a trickle across a fortnight. Save rate is the clearest positive signal: a listener who adds a track to a library has stated an intention to hear it again. Skip rate is the clearest negative one, and where the skip falls is informative in itself. A song abandoned in the first twenty seconds is being rejected on its opening; one abandoned at the third minute is being rejected on its length.

This is how a modest editorial placement can compound. A small list delivers a modest number of plays, and if a meaningful share of those listeners save the track or play it again, the personalisation systems begin serving it to people who never saw the playlist. That second wave is often larger than the first, and nobody pitched it. It was earned by the behaviour of the audience the pitch produced. The same mechanism runs in reverse. A placement on a large list that generates plays without saves teaches the system that the record does not sustain interest, and the exposure ends when the list refreshes.

Which is why treating a placement as an outcome is the common error. A playlist add is a supply of attention, delivered once, for a defined period, to listeners who did not seek the artist out. What is done with it determines everything after. The listener who saves the track, follows the profile, or plays the record again has become something durable. The listener who hears it passively has not. Artists who build past a first placement have somewhere for the attention to go: more music already scheduled, a profile that explains who they are, a reason to come back. Artists who do not find the numbers look excellent for a fortnight and then return to where they started.

■  The Sunset Recorder