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 takyon on Friday September 21 2018, @07:51PM
They kind of have been in some ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JCuEiis8Hw [youtube.com]
Although Spotify faces an intense challenge from Apple Music, there are only a handful of major players and it will be hard for upstarts to compete with services that have 50+ million paying subscribers. See also the long, bumpy road that Tidal [wikipedia.org] has taken in trying to challenge Spotify.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]