Spotify Is Now Allowing Independent Artists To Upload Their Music Directly

Photo: Spotify

Spotify is now giving independent artists the power to upload their music directly from Spotify For Artists to Spotify for free without having to go through a label or distributor.

The popular music streaming platform made the announcement earlier today on its blog.

Working with a handful of independent artists and labels like Noname, Michael Brun, VIAA, and Hot Shade to develop it, the feature is currently in beta and only available for a few hundred US-based independent artists, however, Spotify plans to give access to more artists, labels, and teams down the line.

How It Works

Photo: Spotify

Once an artist uploads their music, he or she will see an exact preview of how it will appear to their listeners. When they are ready to make the music live, they can do so by hitting submit. If any changes need to be made after the music is live, they can easily do so through simple and quick edits to the metadata.

Artists will continue to get paid when their music is streamed. Each month, they will receive royalty payments, a report of how much their streams are earning them, and other key insights.

What It Means For The Music Industry

If the feature is rolled out globally, it will have an effect on a number of parties in the music industry including distributors, labels, and other music streaming platforms.

Distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore typically charge a one time or yearly fee for distribution services, but artists will no longer require their services if they have the option to upload their music directly to Spotify for free. 

In return for funding recording sessions, providing marketing, and distributing their music, labels have traditionally been able to take a larger percentage of artists’ earnings. But, artists will potentially be able to forgo these one-sided labels deals if they can distribute their music to Spotify themselves. As a result, they will be able to keep more of their earnings, and more importantly, ownership of their music.

As for other music streaming platforms, SoundCloud is the first one that comes to mind. It has been a leader in user-uploaded audio content for a while, but a global rollout of Spotify’s new feature could threaten that. Spotify offers a much more polished music streaming platform for both, artists and fans. Artists have been very loyal to SoundCloud due to the ability to upload their music directly to the platform but if they can now do that on Spotify, it won’t  be a surprise if they jump ship.

All in all, Spotify giving the artists the ability to upload their music directly to the powerful platform that it is will have a profound effect on the music business in the long-run. It’s great news for artists, but not so great news for middlemen like distributors and labels.

In other Spotify news, over the summer, it gave artists the ability to submit unreleased music for playlist consideration. 

SOURCE: Spotify For Artists