“Playlisting has become the fabric of the music streaming experience,” said Russ Crupnick, managing partner of MusicWatch. “The ability to listen to and create playlists has become as important a feature as the catalog of music itself.”
Genre designations were a top trait for playlist listeners; 68% listen to genre-specific programming. The source of playlists doesn’t appear to be as important as the content, at least for a solid 85% of the respondents. Discovery and top hits playlists provided by the two streaming services secure a large percentage of ears. Two-thirds of respondents listened to the lists of current hits from both Spotify and Apple Music, while 44% listen to Spotify’s Discover Weekly or Apple Music’s Discovery Mix.
One intriguing factoid is that listeners are more likely to put a playlist on shuffle than to listen straight through the tracks as programmed. Considering how many curators look at playlists as the modern-day mixtape, where flow and placement are key, that’s a surprising behavioral trend.