Spotify just announced a new program called RISE, intended to “identify and break the next wave of music superstars.”
The promises of the program are a little vague, but Spotify says its hand-picked artists will be aided with “multi-tiered marketing” and “editorial programming,” including social promotion, a special “mixed-media” RISE playlist, “bespoke” videos about their life stories, and some kind of platform-sponsored “experiential” events.
The mixed-media playlist will be similar to the featured playlist Rap Caviar, which has audio and music videos in one list. The first four RISE artists are announced in the post, and indicate that the program is for artists that are already pretty successful, but haven’t quite hit the mainstream. The post also notes that Spotify has made a deal with Delta, to feature RISE artists on airplane seatbacks.
The platform has an interest in discovering and featuring new talent, most prominently on its Fresh Finds playlist, which uses natural language processing to crawl music blogs and check their recommendations against the listening patterns of 50,000 “early adopter” Spotify users. Spotify appears to be capitalizing on that reputation with RISE.