BBC Playlister reveals usage figures

By James Cridland for media.info
Posted 7 October 2014, 5.52pm edt

The BBC have released usage figures for their BBC Playlister service.

The service allows you to bookmark songs you hear on radio stations across the BBC, and then export them to YouTube, Spotify, Deezer or iTunes.

In a blog post, Executive Product Manager Chris Kimber writes:

The number of tracks added to Playlister has grown steadily during [its first] year, and overall there have been over 10 million tracks added to around 200,000 playlists.

A user can only create one playlist on the service, so that "200,000 playlists" figure also represents the total number of users of the service across the year. BBC presenters also get a playlist of their own, but once more, only one playlist per presenter.

10 million tracks means that the average user has 50 tracks in their playlist. This seems a high figure, and given that many users of the service would be expected to use it a few times and then abandon it, would point to a small subset of power users.

Chris adds:

The most common place to add tracks from is Radio 1, in particular the Top 40 Chart, but interestingly there are a number of specialist music shows such as Gilles Peterson, Zane Lowe and Annie Mac which are regularly high in the list, and both Radio 2 and Radio 6 Music feature heavily. You can see the most popular tracks added since launch in this view.

Chris also announced that BBC Playlister now works in desktop iPlayer, a redesigned version of the BBC Music artist pages, and a personalised front page.