A Music Streaming Guide to Curators and Their Playlists

Curators are the sometimes mysterious movers and doers of the streaming world. They determine what’s hot, what’s not, and what might have a shot — and all with a playlist.

It might not be a surprise to anyone that Apple and Spotify are themselves the biggest curators in the streaming world — after all, they control their own DSPs. But let’s start with the green giant, Spotify, which, according to our database of the most user-relevant playlists and curators, has a whopping 270K+ curators, 1.1M+ playlists, and 8.6K+ self-curated playlists, the latter boasting a staggering 1.3B+ followers.

How does that work, if Spotify's total user count is something like 250M, counting both premium and ad-based users? Well, listeners must like Spotify playlists enough to follow tons of them.