The Effects of Playlisting Music in China

Promotion is essential

The Chinese digital music market has its own unique traits such as the emphasis on social interaction between the artists and the fans in some DSPs, but at least one thing is the same compared to the western digital music market: Promotion is essential for artists.

One of the best ways of getting visibility for artists is to pitch their songs to a popular playlist with a fitting genre. This is a high demand service in western streaming platforms; if you do an online search for “get your music on playlists”, you’ll get loads of pages discussing this topic (most of them focus on Spotify). 

In China the story is similar. Playlists are popular and people find a lot of new favorite songs and artists from them. We made a blog about the effects of playlisting music in NetEase in 2022. Now we’ve analyzed our streaming statistics again from other artists and the effects of playlisting are still univocal: The songs get significantly more streams after playlist placement!

Playlist effects

Here are some playlisting examples mostly from the electronic music genre in NetEase (and one in QQ Music!).

NetEase example 1

Here we have a really successful example of an artist who got an electronic music song to a playlist in NetEase via Musicinfo. The song was put to a playlist for the first time in May 2022 for one month and its streams multiplied in the following few months. The artist playlisted the same track later for a second time in January.

NetEase example 2

This second example shows a country music song that got over 600 times more streams per month than before putting it to a playlist. The effect of increased streams was visible months after the playlist took place!

The artist also playlisted another song in May of 2022 and in January of 2023, so the synergy of playlisting two songs most likely helped to gain huge stream numbers for the first song.

NetEase example 3

In this example we see the same story: The playlisting works and multiplies the streams for many months!

NetEase example 4

Here we examined how playlisting one song affected the total streams of the artist and the increase in the total numbers of songs streamed from the artist. As the streaming numbers skyrocketed with a factor of 2000 after playlisting the song, the other songs got more attention too! 

QQ Music example

All of the previously mentioned examples have been in NetEase, but we have recently started pitching songs to playlists in QQ Music as well! We do not yet have the streaming data from QQ music after the first playlistings from our own artists, but at least the comments in the playlisted song show that it is getting visibility!

How playlisting works and how you can get your songs to a playlist

We have many partners in China who have a variety of different popular playlists available and we are constantly looking for new ones to expand our playlist reach. We have suitable playlists for basically any kind of music. Once we’ve found the perfect playlist for a song, we get it to the Top 10 and the song will be on the playlist for a minimum of one month.

Get your songs to playlists here!

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