Sometimes, yes — but not always. It depends a lot on how I'm getting in front of them. There are some services that musicians can use to connect with playlisters (Submithub might be the most common) that have built-in chat/feedback features. If I email someone directly, I'll usually hear back, and the feedback will be a little nicer :)
But I don't want to make all playlisters sound like monsters! Most are kind, even when rejecting a submission.
Of course! It's a whole weird little ecosystem — I think playlisters even get paid in some circumstances? I'm not really sure how it works.
Then there's the whole "pay for streams" world, where playlisters "guarantee" a certain number of streams, which is problematic for many, many reasons — namely that it goes against streaming platforms' rules. Anyway, we don't need to get into all that 😅
Thank you for the shoutout, Tania! Regarding the duration of the songs, I have mixed feelings about this ongoing discussion... It’s pretty obvious that there’s a change in the air, but... if you go back to the Beatles era, so many of their early songs were so short, so it’s nothing new. And in an opposite side, there are a lot of young pop artists releasing albums full of 3:30-4:30 songs these days. I obviously don’t have an answer, just thought I’d mention it 😆
"Then again, music has always changed with technology. Early phonographs could only hold about two to three minutes of music, so as a result, that was the length of the typical song from the 1920 to 1950s. The introduction of the LP record, and then the tape and the CD, made it possible to have longer songs, with each medium’s larger storage capacity. Now in the age of streaming, technology and economics seem to be sending us back towards brevity."
I guess both things can be true at the same time anyway, that artists do what they want and are also constrained by the external tools they need to use to reach their audience?
Thanks for the share, Tania — the music landscape is constantly in flux, which is simultaneously interesting and exhausting!
I was curious about your thread - do you get direct feedback from playlist curators about why they decide to include your work (or not)?
Sometimes, yes — but not always. It depends a lot on how I'm getting in front of them. There are some services that musicians can use to connect with playlisters (Submithub might be the most common) that have built-in chat/feedback features. If I email someone directly, I'll usually hear back, and the feedback will be a little nicer :)
But I don't want to make all playlisters sound like monsters! Most are kind, even when rejecting a submission.
I had no idea. Thanks for explaining:)
Of course! It's a whole weird little ecosystem — I think playlisters even get paid in some circumstances? I'm not really sure how it works.
Then there's the whole "pay for streams" world, where playlisters "guarantee" a certain number of streams, which is problematic for many, many reasons — namely that it goes against streaming platforms' rules. Anyway, we don't need to get into all that 😅
Thank you for the shoutout, Tania! Regarding the duration of the songs, I have mixed feelings about this ongoing discussion... It’s pretty obvious that there’s a change in the air, but... if you go back to the Beatles era, so many of their early songs were so short, so it’s nothing new. And in an opposite side, there are a lot of young pop artists releasing albums full of 3:30-4:30 songs these days. I obviously don’t have an answer, just thought I’d mention it 😆
Aha. Thanks for that. I admit I trusted the data and conclusion from that 2019 Quartz piece that I linked to (https://qz.com/1519823/is-spotify-making-songs-shorter/):
"Then again, music has always changed with technology. Early phonographs could only hold about two to three minutes of music, so as a result, that was the length of the typical song from the 1920 to 1950s. The introduction of the LP record, and then the tape and the CD, made it possible to have longer songs, with each medium’s larger storage capacity. Now in the age of streaming, technology and economics seem to be sending us back towards brevity."
I guess both things can be true at the same time anyway, that artists do what they want and are also constrained by the external tools they need to use to reach their audience?