Self-upload music on SpotifyArtists
Once upon a time, an up-and-coming artists' ultimate goal was to get the local radio DJ to play their single, or to get on the front of the cover magazine. Now, there are so many ways and platforms to get you and your songs exposure- social media, good old fashioned word of mouth — and yes, of course, a Spotify playlist is prime among them. One track, placed in just the right mix, can take a budding artist from their home to the big time. With Spotify’s mission to give millions of creative artists an opportunity to live off their music, some of the upcoming artists found their way from their bedroom to bigtime.
But the current dynamics of the music Industry show a poor picture of the Artists getting paid around 10% of the total revenue generated as discussed with Independent Artists on Spotify Communities, YouTube, Reddit, and direct interviews. In the 3-sided market, Independent artists record the music from the comfort of their home. Artists then sign a contract with either one of the Big Record labels(Sony, Universal, Warner) or any distributor i.e. CDBaby, Distrokid, etc. to copyright their music and make the music available on any of the streaming services. Record labels and Streaming services, in turn, sign a deal with Spotify for a Revenue based on an amount per stream, say $0.000437 per stream, which is slightly ahead of Amazon but less than Apple music. In this cycle, Artists get to earn around 10–20% Royalties of the total revenue generated. With this share, Artist would need around 336,842 total plays on Spotify to earn MENIAL $1,472.
If there can be a direct deal between Spotify and Artists, the Royalties returns can tremendously increase. But as per Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, Spotify has no interest in becoming a record label but provide an opportunity to remain unsigned, own copyrights of their music and freedom of choice to share music on different streaming services. This may directly impact Spotify’s biggest competitor due to a closed ecosystem to upload music.
Spotify for Artists is an existing powerful suite of tools to claim your profile as an artist, help you find your audience and maximize your presence. By adding a provision to upload music directly with some metadata of music and provision to be paid will bring a big shift in the lives of musicians.
A distributor Distrokid provides these services to allow music upload and pay back royalties to the artists and interestingly Spotify has a major stake in Distrokid which calls for an opportunity to put it for a major use to let Spotify directly deal with Artists. As of today, Distrokid is acting as an Independent Distributor. For a proposed beta feature on Spotify Artists, we can provide an opportunity for a few hundred existing artists to redirect to Distrokid via seamless login to validate the hypothesis of direct dealing of Artists with Spotify. This feature can be rolled out with a minimum effort to experiment over a few months and compare the earned Royalties for newly released music with the directly signed artists.
Let the music continue to be a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
Disclaimer: The article is written for my own interest in making a case for Spotify’s next feature.
