Tag: artists

You'll hopefully have seen our story yesterday on Spotify's new tests of a tool for artists to directly upload their music to its platform - including our thoughts on why it's less a distributor-killer, and more just the...

Spotify is testing a tool that will enable independent artists and labels to upload their music directly to the streaming service, without having to go through a distributor. The company has quietly been testing this tool...

Africa isn’t one music market: it’s a collection of them. And most of them aren’t that well understood by the music industry elsewhere in the world. That’s why the day-long Midem African Forum is such an interesting...

“You'd be surprised by who's willing to support your music." 

These were the words of my singer songwriter friend E.W. Harris back in 2010 (insert a thick US Southern drawl for a more accurate quote). He had just...

With Spotify preparing for its direct public listing, Universal Music has settled a long-running question over how it will deal with any windfall from its shares in the streaming service. “Consistent with UMG’s approach...

Neil Young has said some thought-provoking things about digital music in the last few years, but his latest blog post about Google could have done with a fact-checker. “Today, in the age of FaceBook, GOOGLE and Amazon,...

Music Ally first encountered British artist ShaoDow earlier this month at AIM’s Indie-Con event in London. Less than a fortnight later, he was holding court at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam. The topic: ‘The...

UK-based musician Laura Kidd writes, produces and records music as She Makes War, with three albums under her belt so far. She's crowdfunding her fourth using PledgeMusic: here's her take on the experience as an artist. "In...

It wouldn’t feel right to have a new Taylor Swift album without an almighty hoo-ha around streaming, despite the star’s rapprochement with Spotify in June. Multiple reports overnight explain that her new album ‘Reputation’...

A few years ago, Spotify had an initiative called ‘Spotlight’ which picked out its new acts to watch, promoting them in its local markets. Hozier, Tove Lo and Jack Garratt were among the beneficiaries. But Spotlight...

Spotify has launched a new mobile app, but this one has a very specific group of users in mind: musicians. The Spotify for Artists app goes live today for iOS, with the music-streaming service promising that an Android...

Not content with running its own startups incubator, Abbey Road Studios is now getting into the mobile apps game. But its new app, Topline, is firmly focused on the London studios’ key customers: artists. The app is...