Spotify recently announced that it would be testing a direct-uploads tool with some artists, enabling them to get their music onto its service without a distributor or label.
Now the company has expanded the initiative to help those artists distribute to rival services, via a partnership with distributor DistroKid – including Spotify making a “passive minority investment” in the company.
“Today, we’re happy to announce plans to enhance Spotify for Artists by enabling artists who upload to Spotify, via our recently announced beta feature, to seamlessly distribute their music to other platforms through DistroKid,” announced Spotify in a brief blog post.
“For the past five years, DistroKid has served as a go-to service for hundreds of thousands independent artists, helping them deliver their tracks to digital music services around the world, and reaching fans however they choose to consume music.
The service has been a trusted and reliable partner to Spotify, which is why they’re a natural choice to enhance the experience for artists using our beta upload feature.”
Choosing one distributor to work with (rather than, for example, enabling several to integrate with the new direct-uploads tool) may cause something of a stir.
It’s also hard not to wonder what those rival services will make of the news: will they be comfortable with it, and will they be nervous that the partnership give Spotify visibility into the analytics for those artists on its rivals, for example?
Update: Spotify has confirmed to Music Ally that it has no rights to see data from other digital service providers: DistroKid will thus not be sharing any confidential information.
The DistroKid integration has yet to go live. “We’re excited to roll out this new technical integration in the near future, and hope to share more information soon,” explained Spotify.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools :: Wyng
Through Music Ally’s internal marketing campaign tracking, we’ve recently discovered an interesting website by the…