Spotify has changed the way artists can upload music, now prohibiting individual musicians from putting their songs on the streaming service directly.
The new move requires a third party to be involved in the business of uploads.
The company announced the change on Monday, saying it will close the beta program and stop accepting direct uploads by the end of July.
“The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community,” Spotify said in a statement on its blog. “Over the past year, we’ve vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more.”
“The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them — like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months,” the post continued.
The direct upload function began last September, allowing independent artists to utilize the streaming site without distribution methods.
Smaller artists will now need to return to sites like Bandcamp, SoundCloud and others to upload their material.
Many people, especially artists, were upset about the decision. You can see what they had to say on Twitter below.
spotify discontinuing their direct upload beta while removing any song uploaded through it shows again how spotify does not give a single fuck about artists
— Sarah (@_herrmannsarah) July 1, 2019
for me the biggest takeaway from Spotify closing its direct upload beta is that the company isn’t actually as globally influential as it thought, with respect to convincing artists that uploading *only* to Spotify was anywhere near enough to sustain their careers + satisfy fans.
— Cherie Hu (@cheriehu42) July 2, 2019
@Spotify sucks. Y’all making artist go through third party sites to upload their music and pay on top of that. As if the third party sites aren’t going to charge as well
— Drew (@meetlamar) July 2, 2019
Spotify turning around and leaving distributors to do their job, by pulling the plug on their beta upload tool is music to my ears, but we saw it coming
— idk what i’m doing (@liltunezino) July 2, 2019
More Spotify news
Pre-saving an upcoming release from your favorite artists on Spotify could be causing you to share more personal data than you realize.
In a recent report from Billboard, it was revealed that Spotify users were giving a band’s label data use permissions that were much broader than typical permissions.
When a user pre-saves a track, it adds it to the user’s library the moment it comes out. In order to do this, Spotify users have to click through and approve certain permissions.
These permissions give the label more access to your account than Spotify normally gives. It allows them to track listening habits, change the artists they follow and potentially control their streaming remotely.
Source: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists
What. The. Fuck.
Robin Edgar
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