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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.
(Score: 2) by schad on Friday September 21 2018, @04:39PM
That's an interesting point, and I was wondering that too. It's a lot like a workplace that has both union and non-union employees.
I wonder how this will play out. Will payments to independent musicians be governed by the same contracts as for signed musicians? If so, certainly we should expect to see some kind of mandatory payment/revenue sharing ("agency fees") in the very near future. If not, it may spell the beginning of the end for record labels -- assuming, of course, that Spotify is actually offering a better deal for individual musicians than the labels are. (From what I've heard of Spotify's payment practices, they very well might not. Which is pathetic.)