General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Love Playlist

Love Playlist (연애 플레이리스트; RR: Yeonae Peulleiriseuteu) is a South Korean web drama about the campus life, friendships, and romantic relationships of a group of college students, produced by the studio Playlist and released in four seasons from March 9, 2017 to August 2019.¹^•² Episodes ran roughly 5 to 27 minutes and were uploaded through V Live, Naver TV, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, with installments posted on Wednesdays and Saturdays.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	연애 플레이리스트 (Yeonae Peulleiriseuteu); also known as 연플리 (Yeonpeulli)¹^•²
Run	March 9, 2017 to August 2019; four seasons, 48 episodes plus 7 specials, 5–27 minutes each¹
Season lengths	Season 1: 8 episodes; Season 2: 12; Season 3: 12; Season 4: 16⁴
Views	100 million by the end of season 2; over 350 million across four seasons by September 2019; 630 million as of March 2020¹^•³
Production	Playlist (Playlist Studio), a content studio founded in 2017 through joint investment by Naver Webtoon and SNOW⁵
Related works	Stage adaptation (2018); television spin-off Dear.M (KBS2); New Love Playlist (YouTube, 2022)⁶^•¹^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and format

The series follows five college students through the ordinary ups and downs of university life: relationships, breakups, jealousy among friends, and reconciliations after fights.²^•⁸ Yoo Hee-woon, a director of the series, attributed its success to storytelling from the viewpoint of millennials about campus life, love, and friendships.³ The principal roles were played by Lee Hyun-seung (Kim Hyung-seok), Jung Ji-won (Jung Shin-hye), Han Jae-in (Lee Yoo-jin), Kim Min-woo (Choi Hee-seung), and Kwak Jun-mo (Lim Hwi-win).¹

The show was known for trying rookie actors and actresses; its most prominent exception was Kim Sae-ron, previously known for playing a young girl in the 2010 film The Man from Nowhere opposite Won Bin, who joined as season four's surprise cast member.³ Bae Hyun Sung appeared in the third and fourth seasons.⁹

Narrative structure and scholarship

The series has drawn academic attention as an unusually long-running web drama. A 2020 study by Tae Bo-ra of Dongduk Women's University, published in The Journal of the Korea Contents Association, analyzed the show's narrative structure and viewer comments; it found that the stories of four couples were composed as independent episodes that realistically depicted meetings, separations, and reunions, while user comments generated discourses on confusing friendship and love, hostility toward third parties in relationships, and conventional gender roles.¹²

A 2022 study by Son So Hee and Lee Dong Eun of the Catholic University of Korea examined how the series sustained a serial narrative across four seasons despite the web drama format's tendency toward one-off consumption. They found that characters continued the story as they won, maintained, or failed to win love, and that the student love stories extended the plot by modularizing the love-triangle motif into four types, which they classified as intrusive, one-directional, closed, and cooperative triangles.¹³

Scholarship on Korean web dramas also cites the series as an example of the format's grounding in quotidian life, in contrast to the more fantastic premises of television romances such as Crash Landing on You.⁸

Production and studio

Playlist (also called Playlist Studio) was founded in 2017 through a joint investment by Naver Webtoon and SNOW, both subsidiaries of the Korean web portal NAVER, under the slogan "Play Your Story."⁵ Love Playlist was the studio's first series, premiering on March 9, 2017.⁵ The studio went on to produce other popular web dramas including A-Teen (2018–19), Just One Bite (2018–19), and XX (2020), and was among the first Korean production studios to focus on the web drama format.¹⁰

Viewership and reach

The series accumulated views rapidly for a web format. By the conclusion of the second season it had earned 100 million views, and season four alone drew 30 million views by its finale in August 2019.¹^•³ Total views for the four seasons exceeded 350 million as of September 2019 and reached 630 million by March 2020.³^•¹ Its audience skewed toward viewers in their teens and twenties.¹¹

Adaptations and spin-offs

Stage. The web drama was adapted into a stage play that opened in June 2018, produced by Lee Sang-min of HU:CON Production as the first play he produced. Audiences gave it an average 9.7 out of 10 stars, and a second run was planned from November.⁶

Television. A spin-off, Dear.M, was scheduled to air on KBS2 in 2021 but was postponed to 2022 due to school bullying allegations against actress Park Hye-su.¹ A follow-up web series, New Love Playlist, was released on YouTube in 2022.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Korean and East Asian web series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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