Music Curation: Record Label's Best Content Marketing Tool

Photo from Pexels

Music Curation?

Music curation is simply the act of finding, selecting, and organizing music into meaningful playlists. These playlists can be associated with a genre, mood, or category of releases. For record labels today, simply releasing your own artist's music is not going to create enough value for your audience. Furthermore, traditional content marketing efforts such as blog posts may not be aligned with the target audience. People turn to record labels for music, not articles, so the easiest way to keep people engaged with record labels is to curate music playlists. 

Why curate music?

1. Relevance

There really couldn't be a more relevant way to create value for a record label's audience in the form of content marketing. This type of content marketing is so closely related to the business that not doing it is simply wasting the resources available to record labels and missing out on an opportunity to create real value for their listeners. As said before, people turn to record labels for music, not articles. 

2. Value

With the advent of music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and more people are able to create playlists, and listen to playlists created by other people. These playlists have become an extremely popular way to listen to music on these streaming platforms, where people can let the music run for hours. Finding good music, and organizing it by genre, or mood can take a lot of time, time that many people don't have. So, there is an obvious need for playlists to be made. Record labels can fulfill this need and become curators of music on these platforms by finding music and making playlists for their listeners. Some record labels only curate their own music, and some make playlists that include music from others. The specific way that it is done is up to the record label, but one thing is certain, making playlists that organize certain types of music for the record label's audience is not something that is optional in today's music listening environment. 

The Point

Simply put, record labels need to become music curators on the various music streaming platforms. Playlists are an extension of the experience created by record labels and can strengthen the relationship between the listeners and the brand. Furthermore, as seen above, music curation satisfies the Content Marketing Institute's definition of content marketing, in that music curation is relevant, and valuable to record label's audience. Creating well-made playlists is a great way to keep people engaged with the record label's content even when they aren't releasing new music.