The founders of startup Spotlister have denied that it was designed as a way for artists and labels to pay for inclusion on Spotify playlists.
The company shut down earlier this month after having its Spotify API key revoked, with an article on tech site Daily Dot referencing the site in the context of ‘playola’. Now the founders have hit back.
“Spotlister was conceived and developed simply to give rising artists the opportunity to submit their music for consideration to the curator community,” they wrote in a comment on the Music Ally website. “Never to pay for placements on their playlists.”
They add that Spotlister only ever had “a few hundred customers” since it launched in November 2017.
“During our short-lived 3 months of operations, Playlisters collected an average of $22 from our platform. As you can imagine, there is absolutely no influence we could have made on playlist placements,” they wrote.
“Only 8% of all posted submissions resulted in a voluntary placement by playlisters. In contrast, other music submission sites cite millions of submissions and an even better placement ratio.”
You can read the full comment via the link above.
“We believe we were caught in the middle of a sensational story that misrepresented and didn’t do justice to our effort and the platform we were building for artists to submit their music,” claim the founders.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…