How to curate a Spotify playlist

Story to my own playlist

I am curating my Spotify Playlist called Future Music for over a year and I now have a good understanding of how curating a playlist works.

One of the most important things, when you are considering to start curating your own playlist, is that you pick a theme, and style of music that you want to feature on it, that fits your own taste. You will go through A LOT of music to curate your list and it won’t be fun at all when you’re listening to stuff that you don’t enjoy. First of all, you will need a catchy playlist name and Cover Art to go along with it. The best way to think about this is to imagine what kind of music people might want to listen to and when. For example, a lot of record labels start playlists for Gaming, Workout, Running etc. or music that has a certain vibe or energy I.e. “Badass Villain Vibes”, “Cinematic Vibes” etc.

You also have space for a short description, use this to include keywords that might pop up in Spotify user searches, like genres, vibes, or things more specifically related to the playlist. BUT, the more unique and niche your playlist title is the better are your chances of being discovered by listeners. There are already a bunch of Gaming Playlists so you might want to pick something else if you don’t want to compete with all the labels and Spotify’s own playlists. The actual process of curating the playlist basically comes down to listening to a lot of music and then deciding whether it fits the playlist that you are curating in terms of style, genre, but also in terms of quality (mixing, production, master).

Good places to start discovering music are:

1. Spotify algorithmic playlists: For example “Release Radar”, “Discover Weekly”. These are playlists made by the Spotify algorithm for your listening profile. You might also want to follow artists that you already have on the playlist or that you like, as this will show you more of their, and similar artists music on the algorithmic playlists.
2. Spotify’s editorial Playlists: For example “Fresh Finds”, “Salt”. These playlists are made by Spotify’s curators and have pretty high standards in terms of production and quality. They are also regularly updated so you can always find new music on them.
3. Record Label Playlists: Most record labels have their own Spotify playlists that they fill with their mostly their own releases, these independent playlists can be great to discover unique music right as it comes out. When it comes to updating the playlist it makes sense to do it regularly, this makes sense to keep listeners of the playlist interested and the Spotify algorithm also favours playlists that are constantly curated. This can be daily or weekly or even every other week. For example, I update my playlist every Monday afternoon. Most releases are on Friday, so it works well for me to listen to new music over the weekend and update on Mondays.