The importance of streaming can’t be emphasized enough. It’s an understatement to call it a critical medium for music consumption. Streaming is now the most important source of revenue for all artists and labels, making up 65% of record industry revenues across the globe, according to an annual report published by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in 2022. In the US, that figure jumps up to 84%. Once music could be distributed through nonphysical means, global sales fell sharply, from $24 billion in 2001 to just $14.2 billion by 2014. Things quickly rebounded with the rise of streaming, however, and reached a new peak of $25.9 billion in 2021. Music downloads never even once took over the music market the way physical media like CDs once did, and meanwhile, in 2021, revenue from streams was more than three times that of physical.

Streaming fundamentally changed the music industry and the way we listen to music. Consider that there was a time when spending your money on music and buying it were one and the same. Knowing what music you wanted to hear and then buying it were two parts of the same process. Radio stations and DJs were the gatekeepers of new music and measures of who had similar taste. Selling music and nothing else was still a viable business model. You would purchase an album and then it would become a part of your personal music library. Music downloads didn’t change this library paradigm, either—the draw of the iPod was fitting your entire music library in your pocket. But what about today? Whether you’re streaming for free with ads or paying for a subscription, you’re no longer limited to listening to a set of songs you specifically paid for. There’s no longer any point in having a music library when you can choose from more than 100 million songs at all times. Every time you listen, it leads to revenue. And it’s all happening on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Clearly, streaming is not a relative of the MP3.

Playlists are at the very center of the services that combine discovering and listening to music into one experience. Everyone wants it to be quick and easy to find music that’s new and interesting but still aligns with their tastes. In a perfect world, we could just say, “Hey Siri, play me something new I would like.” These days the Spotify algorithm gives us a variety of personalized playlists like Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Streaming services keep tabs on all your listening habits—which songs you listen to in full, which you skip partway through, the songs you repeat, the ones you “like” and the ones you share with others—increasing the likelihood that it can figure out your taste in music. But before there was ever an algorithm there were curated playlists made by real people. They first select, classify and evaluate new songs based on every different genre, mood and activity for playlists like New Music Friday on Spotify and New Music Daily on Apple Music. These are where the well-known strategy of exposure through streams starts.

To use pop as an example, seeing a song on the New Music Friday or Pop Rising playlists and then Today’s Top Hits is an almost guaranteed path to a hit. Personally, when I felt K-pop’s spread to markets outside Korea most prominently wasn’t when the songs first had success on the Billboard chart but rather the first time one made it to the first track and the cover of New Music Friday. That playlist has over four million followers, and Today’s Top Hits has 33 million; RapCaviar, a hip hop playlist, has 15 million likes. This is the reason these official playlists are seen as opportunities to find exposure among millions, if not tens of millions, of passionate music fans simultaneously: The algorithm needs a lot of data from people listening to a song before it will ever bless it.

The most popular artists are given opportunities for exposure in every market, but new artists and new kinds of music require something of a different strategy. For one thing, it’s easier to aim for a genre-specific playlist rather than one like New Music Friday that plays everything. A style that checks all the boxes for a newly emerging niche genre makes for a small but undeniable opportunity. To take things a step further, remixing a song in a different style means it might appear on multiple playlists focused on certain genres or moods. It’s commonplace these days for an artist to continuously release new tracks in a long lead-up to an album release because it’s better optimized for a market that revolves around streaming. PinkPantheress is the latest example of an artist who has leveraged all of these strategies and now finds herself at a turning point in her career. You’ll be seeing her everywhere soon enough.

Even Spotify themselves didn’t have any idea at the outset that playlists would play such a crucial role. In the earliest days of the service, playlists were just a way for listeners to share their tastes with others and make recommendations. This falls in line with the rest of the Internet prior to 2010, when sharing was the keyword behind every service. But playlists now do much heavier lifting than simply making music known. The playlist Lorem, for instance, has become a symbol of Generation Z’s tastes. EQUAL and GLOW represent the industry’s interest in female artists and those in the LGBTQ community, respectively. There’s also a Spotify playlist specifically for hyperpop, a term that’s become very familiar in the K-pop world. Hyperpop is also a typical case of another point: When looking at the 6,000 different microgenres Spotify classifies music by based on its location of origin, the era and the style, and most of them don’t have their own playlists. But as anyone can see, search for hyperpop on Spotify and it will instantly make you some microgenre playlists with names like Hyperpop Rap, Hyperpop Upbeat and Angry Hyperpop.

This isn’t just empty talk, either— it’s proof that playlists aren’t just a way for music to find a paying audience but something that fully encapsulates all the different ways we enjoy our music. And this is true beyond Spotify, too. Just look at the Classical Jazz playlist on TIDAL: How do you capture the intersection between Europe’s classical music and jazz, America’s “classical” music, and identify this as an independent concept in music? A listen’s worth a thousand words. We no longer listen to singles and albums—we listen to playlists. Because music is playlists.