Playlist curation is an ugly business

Also, playlists for the week of 3/22

Photo by Barış Selcen on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about playlist curators and what they do for brands. In the post, I brushed on cases of bad actors trying to sabotage competing curators’ playlists on Spotify. Well, now I have a first hand experience to discuss.

For the last week, I’ve been getting these emails from Spotify saying they removed a playlist because it violated their content policies. I knew this report was likely bogus, because of the blog post I wrote. Basically, Spotify has no internal review process for removing harmful content. They just don’t have the manpower to review every report that comes in. Instead, anytime someone reports a playlist, that playlist has all its metadata removed immediately, including title, cover, and description, everything that makes the playlist appear higher in search. The saving grace is that the playlist is still in tact and the followers all remain.

Naturally, some bad actors started reporting competing playlists in hopes that theirs would do better. Sometimes these actors program bots to find trending playlists and report them.

Okay. Fine. If that’s the name of the game, so be it. I received my first one of these emails shortly before spring break, oddly for one of my less popular playlists, and just took it as a sign of success. I’ve been making playlists mostly for fun but also as a personal branding tool, in case I pursue a digital marketing career someday. After receiving the first notice, I just added the title and cover back in and re-wrote the description.

Then, more frustratingly so, my most popular playlist—“Bittersweet early 2000s nostalgia,” which now has over 94K saves—was taken down. I was especially upset because I liked the thoughtful, nostalgia-invoking description I wrote. But no matter. I wrote a new one, and added all the info back. And then it got taken down again. And again.

As these takedown notices became more frequent, sometimes even mere minutes after I added the info back, I started to wonder if I really had done something wrong. I changed the cover to an image I knew for sure was royalty free in case there was a copyright infringement issue. The detriment to this, though, was that the playlist now looked different from the still trending TikTok I made for the playlist. The takedown notices kept coming, usually around six a day. The only solution I found was to keep an excel sheet of all my playlists with the title and metadata ready to copy and paste back into Spotify as soon as the takedown happened.

Then, out of curiosity, I decided to see how my playlist ranked in Spotify’s search. I logged out of my account on a desktop web browser and typed it in. What came up wasn’t my playlist, but an exact copy from a random user, with the original description, cover, and about 10K more saves than mine. I’m thinking the person also blocked me, because I couldn’t find their profile when logged into my account.

What is a playlist curator, and how are businesses using them?

So yeah, kinda upsetting, but there’s not much to do about it. There’s no clear answer to whether you can copyright a playlist. For now, I just gotta stay innovative, and keep on curating.

Speaking of which, here are the playlists I made this week:

Where’s the beach?

Late 2000s- 2010s pop hits, hip hop, R&B, house music, EDM, club songs, party songs, anthems, beach and summer songs - LMFAO, Cobra Starship, DJ Pauly D, David Guetta, Nicki Minaj, Kesha, Sean Kingston

Carefree pirate life for me

Goofy alt rock, summer, chill, old rock, classic rock, blues, roots, reggae, beach music, Caribbean, Jimmy Buffett, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Jesse Rice, Looking Glass, Tobey Keith, Grateful Dead

Homesick or sick of home

Folk, folk pop, Midwest emo, pop punk - The Lumineers, Noah Kahan, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Zach Bryan, Green Day, Phoebe Bridgers, The 1975, Harry Styles, Bleachers

What a time this was

Funky beats and bass riffs, electronic pop meets rock, indie sleaze - MGMT, M83, The Strokes, Passion Pit, Foster the People, Gorillaz, Two Door Cinema Club, Phoenix, Empire of the Sun, Peter Bjorn and John, Arcade Fire, Muse, Fitz and the Tantrums, Coldplay

And finally, for whoever went through all the trouble to steal my playlist

Reputation era, revenge, villain music, fed up, angry, frustrated, tired of the bs - Taylor Swift, Claire Rosinkranz, Paramore, Ashe, Lizzy McAlpine, Lizzo, Florence+The Machine, Olivia Rodrigo, MARINA, Lady Gaga