Inside the small teams at Spotify, Google, and Apple that make tens of thousands of playlists listened to by tens of millions of people around the world
When he's choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in the fight over who programs streaming music. A year earlier, Spotify had shipped its computer-generated personalized playlists while Wired went inside its hunt for the perfect playlist — algorithms versus humans as competing theories of discovery. BuzzFeed's answer is that the humans never left: tiny teams like Carl Chery's in Culver City produce tens of thousands of playlists heard by tens of millions across Spotify, Google, and Apple.
The stakes became visible soon after: reporting on Spotify's Browse section showed some popular playlists controlled by a small group of firms, some owned by big labels, turning editorial slots into leverage over which upcoming artists break through. Nearly a decade later, a Wall Street Journal profile of Spotify's Head of Editorial Sulinna Ong confirms the structure held — human curators still working explicitly to complement the algorithms.
First-order effects
- A handful of editors at Spotify, Google, and Apple effectively decide which artists reach tens of millions of listeners, making individual curators like Chery gatekeepers with outsized power over breaking acts.
- Artists and their labels now treat playlist placement as a primary promotional target, routing pitches through these small teams rather than radio or press alone.
Second-order effects
- That scarcity invites capture: as the Browse-section reporting showed, outside firms — some owned by major labels — move to control popular playlists, so access to listeners gets mediated by whoever holds the slot.
- Rival platforms must staff their own editorial operations to keep pace, since a platform whose playlists miss new artists loses both listeners and the artist relationships that feed its catalog.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, human curation persists inside streaming not despite algorithms but alongside them — editorial teams become a permanent institutional layer, as Spotify's still-standing editorial operation under Sulinna Ong suggests.
- Playlist placement hardens into a de facto chart system: whoever controls the lists — platform editors or label-affiliated firms — gains A&R-level power over which artists get made, raising recurring questions about transparency and conflicts of interest in music distribution.
The trend: Streaming music is consolidating around a hybrid model where small human editorial teams and recommendation algorithms jointly decide global listening, making playlist control a structural gatekeeping force in the industry.