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Spotify to Let Artists Post Music Without Labels

posted by chromas on Friday September 21 2018, @01:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ dept.

Bytram (from IRC) writes:

Spotify to let artists post music without labels:

In a move with the power to shake up the music industry, Spotify said Thursday that it will allow select artists to upload songs directly without record labels or distributors.

Spotify, by far the biggest player in the fast-growing format of streaming, said that the feature for now is only in the test phase for select US-based independent artists who have secured their own copyrights.

But the feature, if eventually put to scale, could in the long run drastically change the business decisions for artists who would not need to go through a label or one of the batch of new companies, such as TuneCore, that provide uploading services for independent artists.

Spotify said artists would simply upload their songs to the platform, first seeing a preview of how it will look, with the Swedish company automatically sending royalties each month.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 21 2018, @03:15PM (1 child)

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Friday September 21 2018, @03:15PM (#738164) Homepage Journal

    Sure, some of the artists will be making a few pennies a month. Some will make enough to get a meal or two out of it. Some, however, might start making real money - money not being funneled into the Spotify's pockets to be skimmed off before it ever gets to the artists. Hopefully, the royalty collection agencies and rent seekers [wikipedia.org] like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, etc. will be disappearing soon. I won't hold my breath.

    There. FTFY.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Tara Li on Friday September 21 2018, @04:48PM

    by Tara Li (6248) on Friday September 21 2018, @04:48PM (#738219)

    Actually, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and the like are not really that bad over all, save when they start going for exclusive contracts (and even that is more something I blame on the idiots who give it to them - see the idiots in the early computer industry that gave MS their near-monopoly by agreeing to contracts requiring them to pay even when they didn't install Windows, and agreeing to *only* install Windows... Bill Gates was bad enough, but I blame the idiots who *AGREED* to it at least as much.)

    But services like Spotify et al. actually do serve a purpose - if nothing else, I couldn't buy a big enough pipe to serve everyone at a price that would pay if one of my songs went majorly viral. Where as, over all, Spotify likely wouldn't notice it except as a minor uptick in their overall bandwidth serving out hundreds of thousands of different songs, perhaps a quarter of which goes to serve out the top 100 or so songs out of that massive collection.

    Even exclusive deals for a limited period aren't that bad of a thing - as long as they're a once-off thing. This bit of series hopping from Hulu to Amazon Prime to Netflix to whatever as exclusives for 6 months or a year at a time is not serving anyone well, and neither will producer/distributor lock-ups like CBS All Access or Disney's rumored plan.