By Erame Okojie

For four years, international powerhouse Butter Music + Sound has cultivated monthly playlists on their Spotify account. Each month comes with a completely new array of different genres and sounds, meshed into a single playlist. 

As a renowned international music and sound company, BUTTER has an impressive range of clients spread throughout several different industries. Lexus, Geico, and Airbnb are just a few of the companies they’ve worked with. I had the pleasure to speak with the Executive Producer of Butter Los Angeles, Annick Mayer, on Butter’s monthly playlists. 

BUTTER has been publishing monthly playlists since you started it in 2016. How did the idea come together?

Essentially I thought to myself, “How do we impress our music taste and curation upon our clients, beyond the one off jobs/genres they come to us for?” We get called for every genre under the sun for original music and through our library, but we needed a way to express our own personal style. Since BUTTER employees are music people, I came to the realization that we should have a way of showing our clients what we listen to — that’s why we decided to start a monthly playlist. 

 Is there a genre or sound already in mind before creating a playlist, or do the songs just come together naturally? 

We tend to keep the genre really open, but we want the music in the playlist to be new to our clients, so the only parameters we have is that the songs have to be under two months old. We have a group thread dedicated to the Playlist and every month Malayna, Butter’s Production Coordinator, will reach out to the team and tell us to start pulling tracks for the upcoming month’s playlist through a shared, collaborative playlist. From there, everyone starts dragging in songs they think are cool for this month. If there’s a crazy amount of tracks I’ll go in and pull some things out, but most of the time as long as they are relevant to the current culture then it’ll make it into the playlist.

I saw Flo Milli on your latest cover, so I knew you guys are definitely staying relevant to the culture.

Oh yeah, and it’s really nice because everyone that works on it has very different tastes, so our playlist consists of everything from summer bangers to indie stuff to a new Neil Young release. There is never one specific genre the playlist consists of, it’s always a combination of a wide variety of tracks.

 Is there a specific demographic that you want your playlists to reach? 

I would say that the target demographic are our clients and advertisers. When they’re in a position to attach music to an advertisement and they need to know what’s relevant to music right now, we want them to come to our playlist. After we do screenings at ad agencies, we’ll send them our monthly playlist with our follow-up emails saying, “Hey, just in case you need new tunes, here’s this playlist.” We use it so that the industry will be able to keep their fingers on the pulse, and we’re there to do that for them. But because what’s fresh and currently relevant in music tends to skew younger, we have a good amount of younger listeners. 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have a favorite playlist so far?

Ooh, that’s a good question, I really loved June of this year. And now this has me thinking, I might pitch to the team that we should do the occasional vintage playlist to spotlight Butter’s best-of playlists.

Check out the playlist: HERE