playlist hypothesis

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

noun

…the baseline idea of a playlist’s premise, target audience, name, [and] songs.1

Each of these playlist drafts is mostly skeletal, consisting of what curators call a “hypothesis,” or basic premise and intended target audience (the more specific, the better), and a few representative songs. In developing them, Colomo will flesh out the playlists with more songs (Spotify’s magic number is 50 — generally between 3 and 3.5 hours' worth — which feels substantial but not overwhelming), a cover image that reflects the hypothesis at a glance, and a short written description, usually no more than one or two sentences...

Hypotheses, of course, are meant to be tested, and Spotify curators regularly make adjustments to playlists based on data that shows how people are actually interacting with them.

  1. Pg. 33 | Pelly, L. (2025). Mood machine: The rise of spotify and the costs of the perfect playlist. One Signal Publishers/Atria. ↩︎

vocabulary

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