(The track eventually racked up more than 4,000 streams - Spotify counts streams when a user listens to a song for more than 30 seconds.)

On June 2, Spotify also blacked out the imagery on its top playlists and posted a symbolic, eight-minutes-and-46-seconds silent track on various podcasts and playlists, representing the length of time a Minneapolis police officer fatally pinned Floyd to the ground with his knee on his neck. (Despite its growth, Spotify did not sell ads for its free tier users specifically targeting the playlist.) “People are finally understanding and getting it.” “It was therapeutic for us to put it together,” Pickett says. Pickett and her colleagues continue to update the playlist, which now has 65 songs, swinging between old and new, topical and timeless, strident and soothing. (At publishing, the playlist has more than 800,000 subscribers.) That day, the playlist racked up nearly 6 million users, and its follower count jumped over two days from 40,000 to 450,000.

“We felt like, if it touched us, it would touch other people.” Pickett’s team launched the Black Lives Matter playlist as a way to express their feelings.Īfter the nation began mourning yet another killing of an unarmed black person, George Floyd, this time hitting the streets in worldwide protests against police brutality, the team quickly updated the playlist, adding tracks like Meek Mill‘s new “Otherside of America.” When the music industry shut down for “Blackout Tuesday” on June 2, Spotify showcased the playlist on its front page to remarkable success. This time, their list included James Brown‘s “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud - Part 1,” Killer Mike‘s “Don’t Die,” Kendrick Lamar‘s “Alright” and Jill Scott‘s “My Petition.” “We were just in the office talking about our experiences, and just hurting and emotional,” she says. As a healing exercise, they did what they do every day: blurted out song titles. After 28-year-old Sandra Bland died in a jail cell in 2015, three days after she recorded a confrontation with a state trooper in Texas, Spotify’s head of R&B and soul Mjeema Pickett assembled her sad and angry playlist team.

Spotify playlist covers black and white