Top music streaming platform, Spotify has been testing out a beta feature with a few artists that will allow the artist to upload music directly to the platform instead of through a label or digital aggregator. This is great news for African artists who’ve never been able to upload music directly to streaming platforms due to their absence on the continent, third-party services like Tunecore have been used to upload music. This new feature will give African artists more autonomy over their music, using Spotify for Artists platform, which, among other things, allows artists to view data about their listeners and directly submit their songs for editorial playlist consideration.
Spotify Launches In South Africa..
The new upload feature won’t work like SoundCloud, where songs can be instantly available. Instead, Spotify views it as a way for artists to have control over their own music in advance of its release date. Those who are part of the program will be shown an interface where they can upload their music and accompanying artwork, pick a release day, input additional information (like if it’s a single or an album), and then preview how it will look once published. Direct upload is being offered as a free service, Verge Reports.
Regarding payments for the artists who upload directly to Spotify, Kene Anoliefo, senior product lead for Spotify’s creator marketplace, tells The Verge that the company will offer artists 50 percent of Spotify’s net revenue and 100 percent of royalties for the songs they upload.
We created a pretty simple and fair deal for uploading music where artists receive 50 percent of Spotify’s net revenue, and Spotify also accounts to publishers and collection societies for additional royalties related to the musical composition. Artists will receive automatic monthly royalty checks. They will be able to view all of that information and check all their data within Spotify for Artists. – Anoliefo said.
Spotify is the biggest music subscription platform in the market, reporting 83 million paid subscribers as of July and a total base of around double that when including free accounts.
The company recommends artists in the program upload content at least five days ahead of the planned release, which will help Spotify make sure that it doesn’t contain potentially infringing content. American rapper Noname used the feature to release her new album ‘Room 25’.
The feature hasn’t been rolled out yet but here’s a step by step process of how the uploading process would go.
