Spotify for Artists Upload Beta to close with the streamer relying on its distribution partners to enable independent artists to upload their music to Spotify. In a blog posting, Spotify announced that the beta which started a year ago will be closing and that from the end of the month they will not be accepting any new uploads.
All the participating artists have been informed of the closure and they are being encouraged to ‘lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community’. Spotify claims that the insights and feedback it has received has helped to improve what it does with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists amongst other things.
Spotify has decided that the best way for it to serve artists and labels is to focus its resources on developing tools in areas where it can uniquely benefit them — like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and its 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).
Transition arrangements have been put in place with Spotify’s distribution partners to help make this as simple as possible for the artists who uploaded music through the beta and who will need to move their already released content to another provider.
Spotify have produced a series of FAQs to help with artists’ questions and will be emailing beta testers with further information by email together with discount codes from its preferred distributors to help sweeten the move. Spotify is also providing a dedicated customer support team to give personalized assistance.
At the end of the posting, Spotify thanked all the artists who had participated in their upload beta and said, “We’re incredibly proud to have played a small part in the music they released. Spotify wouldn’t be what it is today without artists and labels who are willing to collaborate with us to build a better experience for creators and listeners.”
