Here’s the ‘sorry’ note sent to participating artists this morning, and forwarded to Digital Music News.Ī sad day for me as I’m writing to let you know that at the end of this month, the Spotify for Artists upload beta will come to an end. Theoretically, Distrokid would be handling the ‘blocking and tackling’ involved in distribution, though perhaps Spotify still found it difficult to scale the expansion or make the numbers make sense. Running the backend on a lot of this was Distrokid, though it’s unclear how that partnership played out in the beta. After all, would Apple Music accept music distributed by Spotify?
One glaring problem may have been Apple Music, for example. Now, it looks like immense chores involved, including encoding, metadata, and customer service, proved overwhelming.īeyond that, some business and tactical issues may have also emerged. Maybe a few distribution executives are quietly laughing to themselves - last year, more than a few distribution sources were wondering if Spotify was seriously underestimating the tasks involved in distribution. Fortunately or unfortunately - depending on where you sit - it looks like Spotify is hanging up its hat on this one.Īfter running the nine-month beta trial, Spotify came to the conclusion that the program didn’t make sense.
Layer in better payouts, and the death knell was already being rung for a raft of music distributors. Even worse, Spotify was potentially offering the entire direct upload concept for free, and almost certainly undercutting standalone distributor pricing.Įven more threatening was a plan by Spotify - lightly sketched - to distribute artists to other streaming platforms as well.
For starters, the direct upload program threatened to bypass established distributors, all of whom count Spotify as one of their most important endpoints. The concept sent shockwaves into the music distribution sector.
0 kommentar(er)
