Playlists.net: Tyne and WEA

Following various rumblings around the music tech rumour mill, North East based Spotify curation start-up Playlists.net has been acquired by Warner Music Group’s WEA.

Techcrunch reports that the platform will continue to operate as a stand-alone company run by founder and CEO Kieron Donoghue, who said: “We were approached by WEA earlier in the year to discuss ways in which we could collaborate and it became apparent that there was much to be gained by us joining forces”.

Donoghue continued: “What’s really exciting is that WEA have committed to support Playlists.net as an independent platform, invest in its future and grow the team to take advantage of new opportunities in the streaming ecosystem”.

Playlists.net was originally founded in 2009, originally called Share My Playlists, with a focus on users uploading and sharing playlists to a then nascent Spotify, expanding with other music discovery features. As of July this year, Playlists.net claimed 1 million users per month, amounting to 4.5 million “listening sessions” per month, and 1 billion Spotify streams annually, alongside what is allegedly the biggest database of independent playlists.