Editorial recommendation and emerging artists' highlighting on Spotify

This paper examines how editorial playlists affect the visibility and performance of emerging artists compared to established ones, on music streaming platforms. Using a three-year dataset (from October 2021 to September 2024) from Spotify and major-label curated playlists in France, we document the evolving share of emerging artists and assess whether playlist inclusion leads to heterogeneous impacts on streaming performance. We identify emerging artists with a two-year seniority threshold; our descriptive analysis reveals a declining presence over the period of emerging artists across all curators, as well as systematically lower visibility in playlist rank, playlist popularity, and placement duration. We then apply an event-study design robust to staggered adoption to estimate the causal effect of playlist inclusion and playlist drop. While the proportional gains in streams resulting from inclusion (and losses resulting from drop) are similar for both artist types, established artists benefit more in absolute terms due to higher baseline audiences, resulting in greater revenue increases. Our findings highlight a persistent "popularity bias" in editorial curation, with implications for platform diversity and barriers to entry, cultural policy, and emerging artist promotion strategies.