Ex-BBC Radio 1 head of music George Ergatoudis has spoken on the future of Spotify’s massively popular in-house playlists and taking them beyond the Spotify platform as their own brands.

George Ergatoudis left his long standing position as head of music at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra last December to lead Spotify’s in-house music curation and programming in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Now almost a year after joining Spotify Ergatoudis has spoken on the massive potential of their playlists in an interview with Hits Daily Double.

Ergatoudis said:

Some of these shows are going to become brands, which differentiates us from other places to find music, enables discovery and makes life simple for the audience who love having strong curated brands that they can believe in. We’ve got ambitions I can’t really talk about too much now, but if you imagine how you might build a brand and then extrapolate it beyond being just on Spotify, that is a really key part of the future for us.

The plan for our playlist portfolio is to make sure that we are nurturing, finding and helping artists in many different areas and spaces find their audience – and then growing them, enabling them to build new fans and pushing them further and further into the mainstream. I’m convinced that Spotify can enable more breakthroughs to happen than have probably ever been possible before and we are starting to see the beginnings of that.

There is no doubt that the mass market wants an authentic view into what the most popular tracks in the market are at that point in time. For a while, the industry enjoyed using the chart as a way to break new material. When we are in the streaming world, you need to think about mixing those two things together in a way that’s still authentic enough that the public will actually care.