Poolside FM’s four-step blueprint for music curation

Today’s article is related to a concept I’ve discussed in the past: The coming of a “post-playlist” reality.

There’s a quiet, disillusioned consensus among many artists and labels in the music industry that streaming playlists are becoming just as stale in their programming and engagement as terrestrial radio — the very channel that streaming companies are trying to cannibalize.

Yet, the act of curation is still vital to innovation and progress in the music and entertainment industries. In fact, a wide range of practices in music can be considered “curatorial.” Artists curate personal and shared narratives in their albums and on social media. A&Rs curate talent. Promoters and venues curate memorable live experiences. Conferences and summits curate conversations.

Curating compelling online experiences is also now top of mind for almost everyone working in music, as the industry continues to navigate uncertain waters in the coming weeks with scattered, inconsistent reopening procedures for concert venues and other brick-and-mortar businesses.

With this context in mind, I thought it would be helpful to highlight one of my favorite case studies of online music curation in recent years, that has yet to be studied or covered in-depth in the media: A nostalgic, summer-y corner of the internet called Poolside FM.

What is Poolside FM?

At its core, Poolside features a rotating playlist of over 600 summer-friendly electronic/disco/house tracks and dozens of clips from ’80s infomercials, TV shows and news broadcasts, all displayed against the backdrop of a nostalgic interface that resembles the Mac desktops of the 1990s.

The site first launched in February 2014, then relaunched with a new design in July 2019. In the past 12 months, Poolside has registered over one million listening sessions, with zero staff and zero marketing.

Poolside’s founder, Marty Bell, doesn’t come from a music background: He’s a tech-savvy marketer and entrepreneur who co-founded the sunglasses company Tens and the fintech app Nude Finance. Of course, he also happens to be a diehard music fan — specifically of the happier, more upbeat music you hear on the Poolside site. “I couldn’t find a good, central place to listen just to that kind of music, so I started collating the music into playlists myself,” says Bell.

There’s actually a significant ideological connection between Poolside and Bells’ sunglasses startup, Tens: “It’s the whole idea of everything looking better, like a mood-enhancing Instagram filter for your eyes,” he says. “I think it comes from being in Scotland, where there’s not much sun and the weather is miserable for most of the year. The sunglasses make it feel more like summer, and the Poolside FM station is like some kind of virtual getaway.”

To this day, Bell curates all the content on Poolside FM by himself. The music comes exclusively from SoundCloud (10% to 20% of the tracks are from user submissions), and the videos from YouTube. Importantly, Poolside is also a relic of an era where SoundCloud was more open with its API: The streaming service closed its API access application a few years ago, and has “no plans to open up the form in the near future.”

Bell’s curation criteria might sound a bit superficial to the music purist — “If I was sitting by a pool with a bunch of cool people around me, would this song add to the vibe and would those people really enjoy it?” But it’s consistent, and it works. In recent weeks, it’s also served a specific purpose as more people are staying at home: “The site has been getting picked up more in newsletters as a tool to help people work from home and improve their day-to-day wellbeing,” says Bell.

And the site isn’t just a utilitarian mood-enhancing tool: It’s quickly expanding into a wider multimedia brand. Aside from the main website, there’s also a Poolside FM Instagram account with over 55,000 followers, a merch store that helps cover the site’s costs with almost no marketing, an Alexa Skill and a TuneIn radio station that, according to Bell, accounts for 25% to 30% of the brand’s total streaming activity. A Mac desktop app and mobile app are also on the way this year.

One major obstacle to Poolside FM’s future expansion is SoundCloud’s API rate limit on play requests, which is capped at 15,000 plays per day. Such a limit causes Poolside FM’s site to go offline every time it goes viral on sites like Twitter or Reddit. “We’re waiting for SoundCloud to increase their daily limits so that we can release our Mac app and promote the Alexa skill,” says Bell. “We’re also in talks with SoundCloud to work out a more official solution that benefits both of us, like a deeper integration and the option to log in with your SoundCloud account. Thankfully, they really like what we’re doing.”

Lessons for music curation

Based on my conversation with Bell, I’ve gleaned four lessons that music curators can learn from Poolside. As I discussed at the outset of this piece, the lessons that I outline below can apply to many forms of curation across the music business, not just in the context of playlists.

1. Build worlds, not just playlists

I’ve written a lot in the past about the effectiveness of world-building in music marketing. From multimedia, character-driven album narratives, to short films as music videos, to partnerships with game developers, some of the most memorable music projects invite listeners into fleshed-out, multifaceted narrative worlds, not just a collection of isolated, disconnected singles.

Yet, people in music tend not to think of playlists as worlds. In fact, on streaming services, they look more like flat bullet-point lists — with a sentence-long description and small cover-art thumbnail, if you’re lucky.

What makes Poolside FM stand out is that it stems from a world, not just from a list of music. As discussed above, the Poolside “world” is highly personal to Bell, as it draws from his experience in Scotland and the need for a “virtual getaway” through visuals and sound.

“I have a strong feeling that most people use Poolside in the background like radio — but the initial, visual experience is what draws them in,” says Bell. “It sets the tone of, ‘Oh, shit, this is so cool and different, I want to listen to it now.’ Then they dig deeper, check out the community chat and follow Poolside on Instagram. Even if they don’t go back to any of that other stuff, that deeper experience is what pulls people in and retains them. It helps them understand that it’s much bigger than just a playlist, that there’s a whole voice, tone and character to it. If they first encountered the exact same playlist on another channel like Spotify or TuneIn, they would probably disregard it.”

2. Foster community, not just streams

If you look at some of today’s most popular curators-turned-media-companies, such as COLORS, Trap Nation and 88rising, many of them started out as communities on SoundCloud and YouTube. Seemingly simple features on these platforms, such as commenting (which isn’t available on other streaming services like Spotify), allowed like-minded fans to connect and stay in touch with each other, growing organically through word of mouth.

Poolside adopts a similar, community-driven mindset both in its own web design and in its approach to music curation. The main site features a native chat room, which runs on Zyper and has around 200 to 300 concurrent users signed in via their Twitter accounts at any given time. (Those interested can access the chat room directly via the timely URL poolside.fm/lockdown.)

As for music curation, SoundCloud is Bell’s streaming service of choice not just because of access to its API, but also because of native social features such as direct messaging that are not available on Spotify. “If I find a cool, small artist or label, I’ll drop them a message not to ask for anything in return, but just to let them know that I love their music and that I’d love to hear any cool stuff they have dropping in the future,” says Bell. “That social aspect is so much nicer than Spotify, which is a bit cold.”

SoundCloud also has an “In playlists” feature that lets you browse all the user-generated playlists on the platform that include a specific track. “A lot of songs on Poolside come from this group of people with similar tastes as you, manually curating playlists on SoundCloud,” says bell. “And in defense of algorithms, I only favorite tracks on SoundCloud that have made it onto Poolside, so their suggested tracks and playlists are also heavily optimized.”

3. Cultivate artist opportunities that are exchanges and partnerships, not just placements

In conversations about the value of playlists to artists, there’s a lot of focus on placement, which is normally a one-sided interaction in terms of value. In other words, artists might have a lot to gain from being placed on a given playlist — but the curator doesn’t necessarily have a lot to gain from keeping the artist on their playlist over time. The artist’s track is disposable and normally ends up being replaced by another track in service of keeping the product of the playlist fresh.

What stands out to me about many of Poolside’s recent curation initiatives is that they venture beyond the standard playlist format into other kinds of content and experiences that are genuine partnerships and exchanges of value with artists, rather than a temporary handout from the curator side. As a result, both sides end up having more skin in the game.

Bell tells me that he’s been focused on “giving airtime to smaller, unsigned artists” in curating the music on Poolside. But beyond lean-back, radio-like playlists, Bell has also been releasing an ongoing series of exclusive mixes from many music producers who have been featured on the site, including MOODS, Rogyr, mtbrd and Lenno.

“I try to engage with artists with whom we can build off of each other’s fanbases,” says Bell. “For instance, I’m already a big fan of Lenno, and a lot of his music is already on Poolside FM. I know our fanbase already loves his music, and I also know Lenno’s fanbase will love Poolside once they discover it through his mix.”

4. Optimize for delight, not just for growth

The last takeaway might also be the most lighthearted: Organic growth for Poolside FM, and for many other music and tech products in the world, comes from being genuinely fun and delightful — not necessarily from being optimized for a specific metric of performance.

“I still don’t really have an objective with this site, aside from the fact that it’s the funnest side project in the world and makes loads of people feel good,” says Bell. “We’re not really optimizing for growth. The way we make decisions is thinking about how fun it would be if we built a certain feature, versus whether it would help us work toward some kind of KPI. In a way, you are inherently optimizing for growth if you’re optimizing for it being a really good time.”