We partnered with Apple Music and 14 influential members of the Deaf community with strong relationships to music including dancers, DJs, artists, and musical ASL performers to create something that would resonate with a Deaf and hard of hearing audience. These contributors curated an official Apple Music playlist of 176 song selections with everything from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” to Drake’s “In My Feelings.” Accompanying the playlist were special "liner notes" where each contributor explained why they chose their songs, what made them special to them, and how they experience music.

Hey, Apple Music just launched a first ever playlist for people who are hearing impaired. It's really cool. Apple says you don't have to hear every note or lyric to perfectly feel a song's power. Saying for many people, they feel the song through dancing, or feeling the vibrations of the bass and treble through their skin. There are 100 songs on the list, and it has everything from Usher's My Boo to Uptown Funk. The playlist is inspired by the Apple original film Coda, about a child of deaf parents.

A music playlist made by and for Deaf People might seem counterintuitive to hearing people, but it made perfect sense to the Deaf community. That’s because many Deaf people enjoy music, they just experience it differently than the hearing.

Some feel it as vibrations in the skin, some have partial hearing that allows them to hear partial frequencies, and some experience it through choreographed ASL or other visual means.

This insight helped us realize that the Deaf community were music consumers — but despite this fact, no major streaming service had ever made a playlist tailored specifically to a Deaf audience.