The playlist power broker who makes or breaks new artists
Spotify is known for its algorithmic recommendations, but Sulinna Ong brings a human touch to finding new hits.
Every day, no matter where she is, Sulinna Ong puts away her phone, turns off all notifications and lies down on the floor for three hours to listen to new songs.
Ong oversees 130 Spotify employees doing what the service’s powerful algorithms can’t: discovering the best new music and carefully introducing it on playlists to the listeners who are going to devour it. Getting new music into her ears can rocket an artist’s career.
Ong’s team has been including pop singer Chappell Roan on playlists since 2020, including the top slot in Gen Z favourite “Lorem”, helping position her for a breakout year in 2024 and a Grammy nomination for best new artist. Ong has also championed Doechii, a rapper nominated in the same category, over the past four years.
This past week, Doechii had three songs, including Denial Is a River and Nissan Altima, on a playlist focusing on women in rap called Feelin’ Myself. Ong calls her music discovery routine, which she’s done daily for the past three years, “structured music listening”. She sifts through new music that artists or their representatives submit, looking for songs to populate the thousands of playlists her team publishes each week. Her job isn’t so much about having a singular, influential taste as having a vision of what will work where, when and for whom.
Streaming, now ubiquitous through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and social media platforms such as TikTok, has fragmented the listening experience, with fans able to delve into niches that may not be broadly popular. Long gone are the days when top-40 radio hosts and MTV VJs set the agenda for the public at large.
Spotify is beloved for its highly personalised recommendations. Making 640 million users feel like their tastes are understood requires a scale that only technology can offer, and algorithms construct or tweak many of its playlists to suit individual preferences.
But making new music recommendations often requires a human touch, and Ong’s work is central to persuading subscribers, who pay $US12 ($19) a month for ad-free listening, to stick around.
“AI machine learning is amazing at parsing large data sets, but when there is no data, for example, on a new release, on a new artist, what does it do?” Ong said during an interview in December. “If you are waiting for the data to show, you are by definition trend following, not trendsetting.” Ong said she still sees herself as the same introverted music nerd she was in high school, making mixtapes no one asked for. Now she’s the world’s cool older sibling, plugged in to the newest music trends, bringing credibility in each recommendation.
Each day, she and her team sift through as many of the 100,000 new tracks uploaded to Spotify each day as they can. They also hunt on Discord and other online communities for up-and-comers, and often meet with artists to get an early listen to coming releases.
Jeffrey Azoff, who manages Harry Styles, U2 and Anderson Paak, said Ong frequently zeros in on songs that aren’t necessarily being pitched as potential hit singles. “The tracks she gets excited about showcase an artist’s development and career,” Azoff said.
Born in the UK to a Chinese father and Persian mother, she settled with her family for a time in Iran, but they left during the 1978-79 revolution. Her father’s work in the hotel industry meant moving countries regularly, and the family of four eventually settled in Australia.
When she was 13, she saved up enough money to buy a cassette of Goo, the 1990 album by alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Singer Kim Gordon’s deadpan lyrics in the song Kool Thing struck a chord with her: “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?”
“I knew in that moment that I wanted to be in music,” Ong said. She picked up a guitar as a child, but found that her talents lay elsewhere. She learned to compose music with digital software and had a sense that the worlds of technology and music were going to merge. Early in her career she worked in marketing and artist development at concert promoter Live Nation and the recorded music giant then called Sony BMG Music. Before her current job, her positions at Spotify included head of artist and label services and head of music in the UK.
These days, when Ong is listening to music on her own time, not for work, her taste ranges from pop, dance and electronic to hip-hop, dancehall and rock. Her top songs last year included Alone, a new song by ’80s rockers the Cure, and the instrumental Mahal, by Indian-Australian artist Glass Beams.
Ong is an avid video-gamer – Grand Theft Auto is among her favourites – and had to stop live-streaming her play on Twitch after being overwhelmed by people pitching their music there. “Culture and art doesn’t just happen in galleries, it plays out across our screens,” she said.
Ong’s appreciation for culture extends to her personal style, which often includes ornate frocks and elaborate makeup, even when she’s just spending the day working at Spotify’s Los Angeles offices. Her fashion sense makes her a standout at concerts and industry events.
As the streaming giant’s global head of editorial, Ong has editors around the world and is perpetually on Zoom and Slack, and travelling to talk about music. Divided into groups, mostly based on genres such as pop, hip-hop and dance, her team meets every day to share songs bubbling up in their countries.
Ong’s team was early to bless and boost the careers of artists such as emerging UK star Raye (another nominee for best new artist), singer-songwriter Steve Lacey and guitarist Michael Gordon, who performs under the name Mk.gee. When a South African editor brought up amapiano, an electronic-dance subgenre gaining momentum in clubs there, others on the team tested the music on playlists in the US and UK, and it took off.
John Fleckenstein, chief operating officer at RCA Records, said he had a hunch Ong would like a recently signed developing artist named Debbii Dawson and her song, Happy World. By the time he called Ong about the young Midwesterner of South Asian descent with a soft, Dolly Parton-esque twang, Ong had heard it and given it the No.3 slot on the popular “New Music Friday” playlist.
“I thought, ‘There’s Sulinna with her ears’, ” Fleckenstein said. Ong’s playlist decisions are partly informed by metrics such as the number of times users save, skip and complete tracks, and if users are exploring other tracks in an artist’s catalogue. The rest is instinct.
The Wall Street Journal
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