The archive · Content & Film · Product decision · 2021
Warner Music and Apple Music turn pop hits into Saylists speech-therapy playlists
Warner Music and Rothco scanned 70 million Apple Music lyrics so kids with speech disorders could practise difficult sounds by singing along.
Warner Music · Apple Music
What it had to solve
Children with speech sound disorder need constant repetition of difficult syllables, words and phrases, but drills are dull and one-to-one therapy is expensive. Warner Music and Dublin agency Rothco asked whether the repetition children already love — the choruses of their favourite songs — could do the therapeutic work.
How it works
The standard therapy for a child with a speech sound disorder is repetition: difficult syllables, words and phrases, said over and over until the mouth learns them. It works, but for a child it is boring — and Warner Music and Apple Music saw a way to make the repetition irresistible.
Working with Dublin agency Rothco, Warner Music built an algorithm that analysed the lyrics of more than 70 million songs in Apple Music's catalogue to find tracks where the sounds children struggle with appear in repetitive, singable patterns. Speech and language therapist Anna Biavati-Smith helped narrow the results to 173 songs by Warner artists, arranged into ten Saylists — one per problem sound — with Dua Lipa's Don't Start Now standing in for 'D' and Lizzo's Good as Hell for 'G'.
Released in March 2021 to every Apple Music subscriber, Saylists let a child pick the playlist for the sound they are working on and practise simply by singing along to pop songs. Where a single speech-therapy session might cost around £50, the practice arrived inside a service families already subscribed to — a fix that positioned the record label and the streaming platform as useful, not merely entertaining.
Why it lands
- It attacked the real barrier — boredom — instead of the symptom, turning the therapy itself into the songs children already choose to repeat.
- The algorithm worked at catalogue scale: 70 million lyrics scanned, so no new content needed to be commissioned for the idea to exist.
- Expert curation (a speech and language therapist plus the label's own artists) made the playlists both therapeutic and appealing, so they could be recommended with clinical credibility.
- The utility did the marketing: parents discovered the tool through need, coverage and word of mouth rather than through interruption.
What it did
Speech-therapy sessions can cost around £50 for half an hour; Saylists put the same repetition practice inside a streaming subscription and launched it globally on Apple Music. It drew coverage across the tech, music and marketing press, was held up by industry commentators as utility-led brand work, and its case now sits in the D&AD Awards archive.
What you can take
When your audience's problem lives inside your data, ship the data as the solution: mining a music catalogue for therapeutic repetition created a free-to-use aid that no advertising budget could buy.
Since then
Apple Music made Saylists available to subscribers globally from launch, and the World Federation of Advertisers republished the story as a case study in inclusive, consumer-centric marketing. The project remains in the D&AD Awards archive as a documented example of a music company turning its own catalogue into a social good.
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