The author took the operation of playlists on music apps as the starting point, analyzed the popular playlists on QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music platforms, interviewed 20 experts who created popular playlists, and compiled his experience for this article.
1. The significance and purpose of song list operation▎1. Playlist content formatThere are two forms of playlists. One is PGC, which is produced by the official team, such as the official collection of the most shared singles, activities, playlists, articles released by the official operation team, etc.The other is UGC, which is a playlist created by users themselves or actively contributed by them. On the one hand, the creation of this type of playlist enriches the types and diversity of playlist content and meets the needs of music lovers of different genres. On the other hand, good playlists come from the selection of music lovers, the songs are highly relevant, and can more accurately meet the tastes of similar music lovers.▎2. The significance of playlist operationMany users use playlists as an entry point to listen to music, rather than actively and continuously searching for music. Therefore, whether the playlist is rich and the quality of the playlist is good enough determines the frequency and time of user use of the software. The more good playlists users can access, the more valuable the music platform becomes.For content consumers of QQ Music, playlists can capture the traffic of users after they enter the software, provide users with content that they can browse and consume, improve user stickiness, and increase the active time of users on the software.For UGC content creators, the talent development system is used to strengthen operational management and help promote the high-quality content created by talents, so that talents can gain more attention and a higher sense of accomplishment, thereby inspiring talents to create more high-quality content.▎3. Purpose of Playlist OperationThrough official or spontaneous user actions, users are encouraged to create more unique and trendy playlists, promote better dissemination and sharing of playlists, and thus enhance users' positioning of QQ Music.2. Characteristics of a high-quality playlistMainstream music platforms all have the playlist feature. Here I have captured 5,000 playlists from NetEase Cloud Music and used the data to analyze the characteristics of a good playlist.▎1. Playlist TagsNetEase Cloud Music Playlist Tag FrequencyFrom the tags of the playlist, we can see that language tags account for more than 50%, and popularity is the most frequently used tag, accounting for 13.4%. The specific proportion of each label is as follows:Tagged playlists can match the user's listening tags and playlist themes to achieve personalized playlist recommendations. Playlists categorized by tags are easier to find and manage.2. Number of songsThe data results show that the number of songs in the playlist is concentrated in the range of 25-50, accounting for 30% of the total number of playlists. In addition, the proportion of songs in the range of 95-100 is also significantly higher than the number in the surrounding ranges. Combined with specific playlists, I found that many users create playlists with the number of "hundred songs", which will be clearly marked in the title.Titles with "百首" as the keyword3. Playlist TitleA playlist is equivalent to an article. How can we make an article better attract the audience's attention? Naturally, you need to create a more eye-catching title to encourage listeners to listen to the playlist. I divided the titles into 5 styles:①CollectionUse words like "collection", "inventory" and "most complete" to make the audience want to know the details.② Strong attractionUse words like "best", "must listen", "can't miss" to drive listeners to click.In addition, the labels “『』” and “【】” are also attractive in themselves. Aren’t they clearer at a glance among these titles?③ Questioning and rhetorical questioningQuestions trigger resonance and promote empathy and curiosity among the audience.④ NegativeDo the opposite.⑤ConclusionOf course, there are definitely more types of titles than the above five. There are also hot-button and shocking titles. In this era where content is king, song selection is a very important part in standing out from the tens of millions of playlists. Depending on the topic of the playlist, the title will also have some different characteristics. For example, folk singers are all a bit literary, and the songs contain ideals, stories, and girls.Not to mention the ancient style ones, the titles must have some poetry.Comparing the top 30 and bottom 30 titles in terms of collection volume, it is obvious that the titles of the top 30 playlists are far more attractive than those of the bottom 30 playlists.▎4. Songlist selectionYou can also follow the hot spots in the playlist! Playlists that focus on current hot topics are more likely to be recommended by editors. I have interviewed many experts, and their first hit playlists all saw a surge in collections after being recommended by editors.Most of the first hit songs are recommended by the editorIf you can be discovered by the editor in daily hot spots, it means that you are prepared for opportunities in advance. I have sorted out the following three hot spots:The first category is holiday hotspots. For example, there is a playlist of youth memories during the graduation season, a playlist of children's songs for Children's Day, a female special for Women's Day, a playlist of dog songs for Valentine's Day, etc.The second category is foreseeable hot spots. For example, every year’s anniversary of Leslie Cheung’s death, Michael Jackson’s death, related playlists during movie trailer periods (such as the soundtrack to the first film became popular when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was released), playlists of theme songs for film and television dramas, etc.The third category is hot spots that become popular quickly. For example, Taiwan’s gay law, the sudden popularity of Zhao Lei’s “Chengdu”, the review playlist of NetEase Cloud Music’s music review column, etc.▎5. Playlist cover imageWhen classifying the covers of the top 1,000 playlists in terms of collection, I found that these authors particularly like to use pictures of beautiful women, with anime pictures of beautiful women accounting for 25.1% and real-life pictures of beautiful women accounting for 28.9%. More than 50% of playlists use beautiful women as cover pictures, which is enough to show how eye-catching pictures of beautiful women are!Compared with text, it is easier for us to see information in pictures, so the attractiveness of the cover image is directly linked to the click-through rate. Only when the audience clicks on it will there be subsequent listening and collection volume.▎6. Summary of high-quality playlistsDuring the user browsing process, there are three elements that can attract the user's attention: title, cover image, and playlist label. In order to attract content consumers to listen, high-quality playlists will focus more on these three elements. Using "title keywords - picture content - song tags" to organize high-quality playlists, it will appear like this:Through the analysis of the above points, we can understand that a high-quality playlist creates a sense of picture through the titles and cover images associated with the songs, and uses labels to allow users to quickly understand the nature of the songs.High-quality playlists receive higher listening volumes, with the top 1,000 playlists accounting for 80% of the listening volume. These playlists concretize abstract auditory perceptions, encouraging users to click on, browse, listen to, and collect playlists that suit their tastes.In addition to these, when interviewing music experts, I also learned a very important point, that is, you have to be careful when making a playlist. Playlists are originally made for yourself. Only if you like them, there is a possibility that others will like them.Interview experts: Why do you like to make playlists?For playlist experts, the cover title is important, but the selection of songs in the entire playlist is even more important: first, it must sound good, second, it must fit the theme of your playlist, and third, it must fit the atmosphere and emotion of the entire playlist. There needs to be a general sense of direction. This is inseparable from the expert's love for music and the large amount of accumulated listening experience. It is really not that easy to do well.The expert with nearly 80,000 listeners listens to music for at least 2 hours a day3. Survey on existing playlist activitiesQQ Music has organized a lot of activities to promote the creation of more playlists. Here are three official playlist collection activities that I have collected.▎1. Playlist CollectionThis activity is a playlist collection activity within the client. Enter the activity page from the playlist. According to the activity records on the playlist page, we are currently collecting "running playlists". There are three issues in the previous reviews, and the themes are "leg-shaking songs", "movie and movie soundtracks" and "Japanese anime BGM" respectively.Observe the introduction of the activity and the activity flow is as follows:① Briefly introduce the event theme, rules and submission time, and open the submission entrance;② Display the shortlisted playlists to give them higher exposure;③ After the event, select 6-10 high-quality playlists and briefly explain the reasons for their selection;④ Display the shortlisted playlists and recommended experts.2. Song CollectionSong Collection ActivityThis activity is an activity within the QQ group. Theme songs will be collected in the expert QQ group around every Friday. A playlist will be created by sorting out the experts' recommended songs, and will be displayed and recommended on the playlist square and the official account.3. CommentsGather everyone's strength to collect similar songs. The popularity of this activity far exceeds that of song list collection. The participation form is song + story, and the participation method is easy and feasible. The previous activity "The song you most want to hear on the campus radio" combined with the homepage promotion has attracted more than 5,000 participants.4. Playlist Promotion Strategy1. Early stage: event planning① Define the form of participation, time period, and theme of the event;② Clarify the purpose of the event, whether it is to add more playlists or to promote the playlists for subsequent operations, such as playlist collection or song collection;③ Design a clear and simple event process so that participants can understand it at a glance;④ Preset the data that needs to be observed for the event to refer to the response of the event.2. Mid-term: PromotionIn these four rounds of playlist collection activities, I observed that the topic of "leg-shaking songs" had the highest number of participants. When searching for words such as "leg-shaking songs" and "playlist collection" on Weibo and QQ groups, I found that some users shared and forwarded the information about the activity.In order to test whether there is a direct correlation between the intensity of publicity and the number of people participating in the event, I experienced the existing promotion channels in combination with the existing channels of publicity.①Official channel resourcesOfficial Weibo promotionSubmission FlowchartJudging from the operation process of the blog post, users switch between many pages from seeing the promotion link to completing the submission behavior. Every additional conversion will result in the loss of some users.In the content recently pushed by the WeChat official account, there is no promotion of the collection activity, but more recommendations and displays of high-quality playlists. Therefore, this channel can be used to expose high-quality playlists generated during the event and increase the dissemination of high-quality playlists.②Expert QQ groupThe official playlist group and the expert group are the main producers of UGC. During the event, the submission link will be promoted in the group in a timely manner. Due to the gathering of expert users, it is easier to produce high-quality works. This channel should be focused on promotion and publicity to allow experts to strengthen their sense of this event over a certain period of time. With high benefits and high exposure, active users can be transformed into talents, and talents can be promoted to experts.③SummaryThrough the above external promotion channels, the target users are active users of playlists who are willing to contribute. The promotion purpose is to increase the number of high-quality playlists through promotional activities and discover more high-quality playlists. If users are willing to participate, they will eventually need to jump to the QQ Music client to edit, create, and submit playlists.This link will take you directly to the appTaking the above activity as an example, this link has an obvious button to guide users to open it in the APP. If this link mode is used uniformly for guidance, users can jump directly to the client regardless of the link entrance through Weibo, WeChat or chat records, which can reduce the loss of target users in the process and improve the conversion rate of submission behavior.3. Later stage: PromotionThe playlist recommendations on the homepage are based on the user's tastes, and the high-quality playlists produced by activities are more suitable for promotion in the form of special topics on playlist squares or new media platforms.Review of previous playlistsThe results of the winning playlists after previous events can also be pushed to public WeChat accounts and Weibo. The target users are consumers of UGC content, so priority should be given to trendy playlists or playlists related to hot topics to increase listening rates. For the music talents produced by this activity, we need to increase their exposure so that they can also gain recognition and encourage them to produce more.▎4. Activity reviewDuring the early planning, I mentioned the need to set up some data dimensions to examine the success of the event. For reference, I have listed the following dimensions:Communication efficiency: the number of users entering the page, the activity of the topic, the amount of sharing, and the communication path;conversion rate: the conversion rate of different promotional channels from seeing the information to completing the submission, and the proportion of high-quality and high-quality playlists in the submitted playlists;activity: whether the activity and active time of the playlist section have increased.Data review is conducive to the planning and adjustment of the next activity, and it is convenient for operators to examine whether the expected purpose of the activity has been achieved. During the entire playlist activity, the activity is promoted with clear goals, and the direction of the activity is adjusted according to the real-time feedback from users to be better responsible for the results.The collection of high-quality playlists is selected by official staff. If you want to expand the promotion of the playlists, would it be better to promote them from the perspective of content consumers? For example, expand the scope of song collection activities, rather than just targeting experts in QQ groups.High-quality playlists can help QQ Music better enrich its playlist library, and high-quality playlists can promote content consumers' recognition of the platform, thereby enhancing user stickiness. These high-quality contents are inseparable from the contributions of experts. So how can we give full play to the importance of experts and make QQ Music more valuable and attractive? In the next section, let’s talk about talent operations.5. User Operation: Expert Operation1. User stratificationAccording to user stratification theory, core users can be roughly divided into the following four levels of users:The first level is experts and masters. They have a deep understanding of a certain genre, the playlists they create are of high quality and popularity, they have a large number of fans, and they are officially certified as "experts and masters."The second level of playlist masters are music lovers. Although their influence is not as great as that of experts, their unique grasp of music and the large amount of music they listen to give them the motivation to create more and more innovative playlists. They can also quickly increase their own influence and the influence of their own playlists with the help of editor recommendations or increased playlist publicity.The third layer is active users, who are active on the platform for a long time, have the awareness of finding good music, can judge the quality of playlists based on their own subjective consciousness, and are willing to share and spread playlists. And they can actively participate in official operations and are willing to support playlist masters or their own idols.The fourth layer is the demand public, who are generally the consumers of the platform. They use the music platform to satisfy their need to listen to music. They are consumers of playlist content and will leave when they find what they want.2. The needs of expertsAfter analyzing the user stratification, in order to better understand the ideas of experts, I found 20 music experts in the top 1,000 playlists on NetEase Cloud Music. They have created multiple high-quality playlists with more than 10,000 collections and have more than 10,000 fans on the platform. 15 out of 20 people responded to me.The expert tells me about the process of making a playlistOriginally, I just interviewed three people with a try-it attitude, but unexpectedly, all three of them responded to me, and one expert even told me in detail about her mental journey since making the playlist and the changes in the platform atmosphere. It greatly inspired me to interview more experts. Through the interview, I would like to put forward a few of my own views:① 90% of the experts’ first hit playlists became popular after being recommended by the editor. After having the first batch of fans, they continued to grow bigger and bigger.② For users who can continuously create good playlists, the number of songs they listen to and their active time have a great relationship with the output of playlists.③ Even if the platform allows communication, experts will set up their own communication circles on the social platform.User requirements:①Hope that your playlist can be recommended and recognized by the platform.② There are topics and playlists that he is good at writing about to satisfy his interest in music3. User OperationAfter gaining an in-depth understanding of the ideas of some influencers, I divided the influencers' user operations into three parts.①Open SourceFor active users who have the potential to become experts, an operation model can be set up. The data that can be used as reference include the length of time they listen to songs, the number of songs they listen to, the frequency of creating playlists, and the number of times they participate in operation activities. A number of users are selected through model calculations, and then manually screened to increase the number of experts.②ThrottlingThe loss of high-quality talents is also a loss for music platforms, because there are only a few people who can accurately control the playlists and have the energy to create playlists. Such losses may affect the overall quality of the playlists.The loss of talentIn my communication with experts, I learned that the playlist function of QQ Music was opened very early, so why did it eventually become the core function of NetEase Cloud Music? The reason lies in the different positioning of the platforms. NetEase Cloud Music supported various types of playlists in its early days, but QQ Music took the route of popular playlists, and at this time a group of users who were willing to innovate were lost.At the same time, influencers are also ordinary people. They are willing to be interviewed by me even if they don’t know me. The platform can also establish an operational data model to make targeted adjustments to influencers whose interview activity has decreased to preventloss.③ Promote vitalityDefine core operational data standards for different operational activities. For example, the creation threshold for song collection is lower than that for playlist collection, so more people should be involved, and attention should be paid to user retention and activity in the process.SummarizeThrough in-depth analysis of QQ Music products and playlist functions, I really learned a lot in this process.First, this study helped me understand what a high-quality playlist is and how to operate a good playlist.The second is the experience of finding data during research, which allows me to understand how to find data mining data and identify which data are meaningful;A very sincere and music-loving personThe third is an interview with a playlist expert. This part is where I gained the most. The responses from the experts were much better than I expected. I learned about their views and experiences on creating the playlists they love, how the first hit playlist came about, their standards for a good playlist, and some of their views on the platform, etc.
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