A TASTE OF RAINMAKERS 2024: SULINNA ONG

Spotify Global Head of Editorial Sulinna Ong has quickly emerged as one of the most influential execs in the streaming space, deftly combining intellectual rigor and an emphasis on the human connection that technology can facilitate. Most of Ong’s career—and indeed, much of her life—has been about the quest to effectively marry music and tech. We asked her to elaborate and did our best to keep up; along the way, we also delved into her fascinating backstory and her deep interest in horror, sci-fi and related genres.

In the world of Spotify, what does “editorial” signify?

Editorial at Spotify refers to the curation and programming of content—namely music, in this instance. Our focus is to provide the best and most culturally relevant music experience for users with a focus on new music and discovery. The editorial teams at Spotify are deep music and culture experts. We work very closely with product teams to infuse this human music expertise and cultural intelligence into the products and features that we build for users.

What sorts of indicators do you look for in determining if an artist, song or trend is going to be significant?

Every week we meet as an editorial team; editors around the world discuss what’s happening in their local markets. And then we start to test outside of the original domestic market and introduce the music in very strategic ways. So it’s a combination of gut and data. We’re looking at things like people listening to the song and engaging with it in a variety of ways. They might add it to their playlist. They might come back to it later. They might explore the catalog of that artist—that’s a particularly encouraging action. Another high-quality signal we examine is the performance of tracks within Spotify’s owned and operated playlists. Each playlist has an audience of its own with particular behavioral nuances. We analyze how a track performs in each playlist to get a view on how it reacts with a certain audience group and how they correlate—or don’t—with one another.

Where do human curation and machine learning intersect?

Human curation was never about manually curating a playlist for each individual user, as that is simply not scalable. No matter how much time I put into it, I can’t curate a playlist for 600 million users. We use technology to scale our expertise as editors and get it to as many people as possible. Around 2018, our editors and product teams made their first attempts to bridge human curation with our personalization engines. That was largely due to technological innovation with personalization and machine learning. This collaboration resulted in personalized editorial playlists, where tracks fit an overall mood or moment, which is set and curated by our editors, but personalized [by tech] for each individual listener.

What do you think are the key differentiators between Spotify and other DSPs?

There are three things:

1. It’s the global scale of Spotify, but it’s not a monolith forcing everyone to listen to a small subset of the same songs or playlists. We have huge global reach and scale, but local nuance and local relevance are really important to us. It’s why we’ve invested in having editors and editorial teams in local markets very early on, because what feels authentic in India as a listening experience is very different from what feels authentic and is desired in the United States.
2. The next step on from that is taking local sounds and artists to the rest of the world and that’s done via our Global Curation Groups (or GCGs, as we refer to them internally), where editors meet regularly from around the world to discuss local listening trends, important/bubbling artists, tracks and genres from across the globe and how we introduce them to new markets and more audiences worldwide.
3. The third is the fusion; the investment that we’ve made in human editorial intelligence and music and cultural expertise, and scaling that with technology. The effort is to connect with listeners on a human and emotional level, even though we’re using state-of-the-art technology. That human connection and how people listen to music can never be separated.

Ong with Spotify's Jeremy Erlich, Noah Kahan and Spotify's Madeleine Bennett

You told me that you religiously listened to about three hours of music per day on average. How do you approach that, and what are the key benefits of doing it?

When you think about a professional athlete, they have to go to the gym to maintain their body in order to perform at a certain level. It is not unlike that for me, in that I am the global head of editorial. I think everyone understands that we get an enormous amount of music every day at Spotify. It’s over 150,000 tracks daily. But the three hours allows me a structured listening to really get up to speed with new releases and listen more deeply. When I get an album from an artist, I will really listen to it three, four, five times straight through. It’s not just superficial listening. And then there’s also what I call “digital digging in the crates” where I’m hunting for unearthed gems that artists have submitted via our Spotify for Artists pitch tool.

Say a bit about your early life, which is unlike anyone else’s story I’ve ever heard.

I am the child of immigrants. My father is Chinese and my mother is Persian. They met in London as students, and when I was a baby, they moved back to Tehran, which is where my mother is from, because they thought that was where they wanted to settle and raise their family. But fate had other plans; the Iranian Revolution happened, and we fled Iran. My mother’s family made arrangements for us to leave as soon as possible, given that my mother was married to a foreigner and had a mixed-race child. That was the last time my mother saw her parents alive, and we lost family members. What followed was a very nomadic childhood in many different countries. I went to 11 schools during my high school and primary years. What that taught me was adaptability and self-sufficiency.

So what were you interested in?

The two things that really gave me joy and self-confidence were music and technology—and they continue to. The technology side manifested early on as a love of video games, which I still have to this day. I’m still a heavy gamer.

What was the first game that really captured your imagination?

I think they were Wonder Boy and Frogger. My brother and I had an Atari, which, to our amazement, our parents let us have in my brother’s bedroom. We would sit in his bedroom and play for hours. It blossomed from there, and we went on to discover and play more sophisticated games.

What was the first music that really resonated with you? Was there music in your household growing up?

When I was 10 years old, I had what was really, truly an epiphany in the purest sense. I had just bought Sonic Youth’s album Goo on cassette. I saved up my money from doing chores around the house and also would go around and knock on neighbor’s doors to see if they wanted anything done, to earn a little extra money. I bought Goo, and the song “Kool Thing” started playing. Lying on my bed, in a haze of preteen existential angst, I can still remember Chuck D’s line: “Tell him about it, hit him where it hurts.” And then Kim Gordon purring, “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” And in that precise moment, I knew that music was everything; I had to make sure music was my life.

Finally, I wanted to ask you about a shared affinity of ours. You’re a big fan of horror, science fiction and fantasy. How do these genres inspire you or enhance your creative impulses?

I was a big reader as a child, and I still am. I read vociferously, and I’ve always loved science fiction—which is linked to my love of technology—as well as fantasy and horror. Science fiction fascinated me because I didn’t think it was fiction. A lot of these things are coming to pass. Unfortunately, I think we’re in the early stages of the dystopian sci-fi future that we’ve read about in books. Not to get too dark. I remind myself that I’m mortal, and for whatever time that I have on this earth, I’m going to make it count. Life is chaos. That’s all there is to it, and I find that realization liberating.

(The 2024 edition of Rainmakers will be published this fall.)