Spotify Sits Down With American Songwriter To Celebrate Five Years Of Hot Country

This past November, after gaining 6 million followers, raking in 5 billion streams and becoming one of the most popular playlists on the planet, Spotify’s Hot Country playlist celebrated its fifth anniversary. 

Thanks to Spotify’s fine-tuned curation skills, their hyper-attentiveness to their audience and the proverbial finger they’ve got resting on the pulse of the industry, Hot Country has become an essential hub for all things popular in the world of country music. Whether it’s introducing listeners to new faces like HARDY or treasuring old classics like Brooks & Dunn, Hot Country has cemented itself as the go-to destination for everything coming out of Nashville and the country music industry as a whole.

Yet, after seeing the streaming data and the real-world successes of some of the playlist’s stars (like Morgan Wallen, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Combs and Chris Stapleton, to name a few), it’s difficult to wrap your head around how quickly this Swedish streaming platform was able to become an integral part of Music City, U.S.A…. at least that’s how we felt after speaking with Brittany Schaffer, Spotify’s Head of Artist and Label Partnerships for Nashville.

“We now have 15 employees based here in Nashville,” Schaffer told American Songwriter. “That’s incredible growth considering that I was the sixth person to join the team when I began working there three years ago.” 

See, Spotify’s Nashville operation first opened its doors in 2013, right as the streaming revolution was really kicking into high gear. Since then, the team has expanded rapidly, especially insofar as their partnerships with the industry based out of Nashville goes. “Whether we’re partnering with C.M.A. or A.C.M. or the Gospel Music Association, we’re the team that makes sure that we stay connected with the music community-based in Nashville,” Schaffer explained. “Rachel Whitney and I also spearhead our strategy around the country music genre. Specifically, we’re strategizing how we engage with fans and artists, on and off of the platform, for country music, gospel, folk and Americana.”

With these partnerships, Spotify began building trust with the seasoned Music Row-types while also upping their appeal to the trendy troubadour-types hanging out across the river in East Nashville. Yet, for as many connections and relationships as Spotify fosters with the industry, the platform strives to stay focused on its primary constituency: the listeners. 

“Just like in any entertainment medium, we have to be a mirror and reflect the tastes of our audience in order to provide an unparalleled listening experience,” John Marks told American Songwriter. A radio veteran and well-known Nashvillian, Marks joined the Spotify team in 2015 as Head of Country, where he oversees “curating playlists and coordinating release strategies with labels, artists and music creators of all kinds.” Continuing, Marks explained that Spotify is adept at navigating all of the diverse and distinctive strains of country music being made today. 

“Believe it or not, within the ‘country’ genre there are hundreds of different playlists that help our listeners discover the newest artists, music and sounds,” he said. “The unique advantage Spotify has is that we can go high, wide and deep in any music experience you’re looking for — that’s true for country music too. Whether you like the newest cutting-edge music, the big superstars or music from the past, there is an ideal landing place for you. We have music to suit your every mood and taste with playlists like Party Cove, Tailgate Party, Country Nights, Country Cookout and 90s Country, just to name a few. We also collaborate cross-functionally with our editorial colleagues in other genres to surface country music that has crossover and cross-cultural appeal. Our most recent effort is Country Latino, an effort with our Latin counterparts to highlight country music featuring Spanish language. The playlist is new, but we see this as an entry point for country music fans who may love Latin music and vice versa.”

Still, for as many amazing options as Spotify has curated, both Marks and Schaffer point towards one playlist as the main country music hub: Hot Country. 

“Hot Country is our flagship country playlist that includes, essentially, the most popular country songs on Spotify,” Schaffer said. “That can have a really wide range of sounds and include a large number of artists — a lot of what we do is create a destination for discovering all things country. We want to make sure that we’re supporting dynamic, emerging artists as well as respected icons in the country space. So, with that in mind, you’ll see everyone from Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen to Brooks & Dunn, depending on who’s releasing music at that time.” 

Brooks & Dunn in particular serve as a fantastic case study to demonstrate the power and reach of Hot Country. Despite being internationally renowned for several decades, the duo saw an amazing 40% uptick in listens once they were added to the playlist. Yet, this story is no outlier: one of the most exciting elements of Spotify’s Nashville presence is the amazing work they do to connect artists with all sorts of listeners, both on and off the platform itself. 

“Country music has always had an incredibly close connection between the artists and the fans,” Schaffer said. “We have worked really hard to translate that connection to everything we’re doing with Spotify. One of the ways that we see that is in some of the work we did right after COVID-19 took all of the artists off the road. Everyone was looking for ways to stay connected with their fans without being able to do it in-person. There were so many Zoom calls going on that the team launched a series called ‘The Drop-In,’ where an artist would ‘drop-in’ on a Zoom conversation. Morgan Wallen and Tim McGraw both participated in that and it was really incredible to watch the excited community of fans get to engage with the artist. I love that. Even a superstar like Tim McGraw wanted to be a part of a series like that.”

Schaffer went on to explain that “The Drop-In” is just one example of the many, many ways Spotify is reimagining what being an artist can mean. Another popular innovation is the introduction of the enhanced album, which gives listeners a new, more in-depth way to connect with their favorite music through a variety of mediums. 

“The enhanced albums that we’ve recently launched with artists like Sam Hunt and Kelsea Ballerini might be the best example of bringing niche and innovative experiences to fans,” Schaffer said. “We’re capturing video content along with stories behind songs and unique visual images to really bring those albums to life. All in all, it’s been really exciting to watch Nashville embrace not just streaming and how we think about releasing music, but also how they consider engaging with their fans on and off our platform.”

Thanks to these innovations, the generations-old country music family has not only survived the streaming paradigm shift, but has actually come to thrive. Nonetheless, the country music family is a family (albeit, metaphorically) — so, like all families, there are disputes that sometimes come up. Longtime country fans and historians are sure to note that for as long as a genre called “country” has existed, arguments about what is and what is not country have also existed. While this seems like it might spell disaster for Spotify — who are tasked with curating the definitive list of country music hits — Marks explains that the opposite is true.

“I’ve realized that I have been in this business for over 50 years,” Marks said. “In all of that time, the ‘question’ has never fully been answered and has not gone away. It’s worth a chuckle that at least 50 years later, fans still grapple with that. Yet, whatever past naysayers have deemed as ‘not country’ has not stopped the evolution of the music. It simply keeps moving forward — and, today, moving more rapidly in this changing world. If I may be so bold, Hot Country is a direct reflection of that by saying ‘this is country.’ It’s a grouping of songs in the list, in the giant Spotify world of music, that are the hottest songs in the world as defined by the country genre. I’m sure someone could point to some songs there and say that it’s not ‘country,’ but the data and listener preferences would say otherwise.”

When asked if the “is it country?” debate ever went down between members of the Spotify team itself, Marks chuckled. “That’s funny,” he remarked. “I can truthfully say: no. We have a team of professionals in the Nashville office who are true music professionals and fans. We all have our eyes on what is trending and we don’t get bogged down with that. Very simply, the fans will make that decision for us. Our job is to properly reflect those tastes in our playlists.”

To Marks’ point, the one major debate of country pedigree from the past five years was a debate easily settled by the fans themselves. That debate? Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Despite being removed by Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart on the grounds that it didn’t “embrace enough elements of today’s country music,” country music fans on Spotify flocked to the song. So, in turn, Spotify listened to their audience and supported Lil Nas X. 

“There wasn’t much of a conversation about Lil Nas X that I can recall in pondering his music as ‘country enough’ for our playlists,” Marks remembered. “What I do recall is getting calls the weekend he premiered at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. At that time, I didn’t even know who he was. But when I saw that he was booted from the chart because he ‘wasn’t country,’ that pissed me off. Just because a couple of executives didn’t like seeing an ‘outlier’ in the country space, they had to boot him off the chart. That’s all I needed — he went on primary playlists immediately and the rest is history. That moment, however orchestrated or not, created a cultural moment for him and country music… a landmark moment that created a sonic boom. I will give Lil Nas X so much credit for making noise and forcing the country music community to pay attention, but I also must point out that artists of color like Darius Rucker, Jimmie Allen and Willie Jones were already working in this space and were earning legitimate recognition. And today, there is Mickey Guyton, Brittney Spencer, Tiera and more who are now contributing to this awakening which will make our genre stronger.”

It’s true — the recent passing of American legend, Charley Pride, has even further illustrated the complex and multi-ethnic nature of country music, stretching all the way back to its origins. When looking at the story from that retrospective point-of-view, it becomes clear that trying to discredit something as “not country” is a trivial task. What’s more important is the ethos of country, the communal and cathartic nature of its endearingly enduring presence. In this sense, Spotify’s innovations are less of a “departure” and more of a “continuation” of the genre the Grand Ole Opry popularized all those years ago. For Spotify’s part, the love they have for the artists they support is not unrequited.

“In 2016 or so, I met John Marks and started hanging out with all of those boys and girls at Spotify,” rising country star Morgan Wallen told American Songwriter. First rising to prominence as a contestant on The Voice back in 2014, Wallen has become a mainstay of the modern country landscape and currently has five tracks featured on Hot Country. An indispensable part of his artistic journey, Wallen noted that the Spotify Nashville team feels “like collaborators to me.”

“They’ve been really awesome to us,” he continued. “They let us try things. They let us find out if a song is potent or not. They’ve been a great teammate to us and we work really well together. We’ve led at points, they’ve led at points — they’ve just been incredible.” 

Likewise, Spotify feels the same way about Wallen. “Morgan Wallen is an artist that we have been very lucky to work with since he launched his first track,” Marks said. “To see his popularity skyrocket and his music be so well received by his fans is the reason why we at Spotify support artists in the way we do.”

With that final line there, Marks gets at the heart of Spotify’s Hot Country playlist, the same thing that’s been alluded to throughout the entire article: the sacred relationship between the artist and the listener and the magic that can ensue from it. Spotify has always had a knack for crafting such a personalized and meaningful experience that it seems to give your entire musical life a new perspective. In our interview with Schaffer, she told one specific story that illuminated this exact phenomenon. 

“In 2018, we had four customized crop circles created,” she began. “It included one image of Kelsea Ballerini, one of Jason Aldean, one of Luke Bryan and then the fourth was of the Hot Country star. We did these in Kansas, where we had the land, space and ability to do that. The way that we rolled them out on social media was having each of the artists post a photo on each day of the week, eventually revealing the crop circle. It was really incredible to watch the fan buzz on what was going on — ‘who is doing this?’ ‘Is this part of a larger announcement?’ — stuff like that. Then, on the fourth day, we revealed the Hot Country star, showing that Spotify was behind it.” 

Beyond being just another fun way to celebrate those artists and the implementation of the playlist, these crop circles embodied Spotify’s commitment to listening to its audience and making them feel seen. Something like cryptic crop circles captures the imagination of all sorts of music fans, rural and urban alike, while also speaking to an age-old American tradition of culture.

“It was fun too to do that in a part of the country that doesn’t always get the exciting publicity splash that you sometimes see in New York or Los Angeles,” Schaffer continued. “There was even a Spotify employee who said ‘I’m from Lawrence, Kansas — nobody ever does something this cool in my hometown!’ That was a really special moment for us and was certainly a big part of bringing this playlist to life for us.”

In 2013, the same year that Spotify opened up their Nashville office, former Twitter C.E.O. Dick Costolo described Twitter as a “global town square.” If we work with this model and see online entities as digital versions of their ‘real-life’ counterparts, then there is no doubt whatsoever that Hot Country is on the fast track to being the “global Ryman Auditorium,” sharing the beauty of country music magic for the whole world to hear. What a wonderful thing.

Explore Spotify’s Hot Country playlist below: