
Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists - DyslexicAtheist
https://www.altpress.com/news/spotify-independent-artists-upload-music-streaming/
======
jasode
The submitted article doesn't mention it but my guess at connecting the dots
is that it's related to EU Article 13's stringent requirement of "upload
filters"[0].

Yes, Spotify's direct uploading _" gave opportunity for small artists to share
their talent"_ \-- but that same mechanism also made it too easy to upload
copyright infringing content.

Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like
Youtube's ContentID[1], shutting down the direct upload was their best course
of action. Restricting uploads to their distribution partners (record labels)
is the human version of the "contentid" algorithm.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=eu+"article+13"](https://www.google.com/search?q=eu+"article+13")

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+"contentid"](https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+"contentid")

~~~
njl
Spotify has internal fingerprinting stuff that can handle this easily enough.
The shutdown is entirely due to pressure from the record labels. It's a shame;
this was a surprisingly difficult product to get off the ground, and a lot of
folks put in heroic efforts to make it work.

~~~
cwkoss
Music labels are strangling culture in America. Please pirate music to avoid
funding music industry lobbyists in their efforts.

~~~
tomdell
This is uninformed and off-topic.

~~~
DocTomoe
How so?

------
circlefavshape
Most likely explanation - nobody was using it. They only introduced it as a
beta feature recently, and you have to use a distributor like CDBaby or
distrokid to get your music onto other streaming sites anyway, so unless you
were _only_ interested in Spotify there was no point

~~~
pcsanwald
+1. I'm a musician who has released albums and I'd never use something like
this, because who wants to manage distribution for every platform?

DistroKid/CDBaby are a much better way to do this.

~~~
steve-benjamins
As a fellow artist I disagree :)

I’d totally use this. Spotify and Apple Music are 99% of my plays. The other
services don’t matter.

(Youtube and Soundcloud are uploaded separate from Distrokid / CD Baby.)

------
creaghpatr
This sort of addresses a number of disparate issues related to quality
control. I don't know how I feel about it, but they probably had to do it to
prevent becoming the next YouTube. As long as they don't allow user ratings or
user comments they should be fine.

[https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-
si...](https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-silent-album-
that-earned-indie-band-20000)

[https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-
fo...](https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-
for-1-million-without-breaking-a-single-law/)

[https://www.vulture.com/2017/07/streaming-music-cheat-
codes....](https://www.vulture.com/2017/07/streaming-music-cheat-codes.html)

~~~
neetodavid
El-P has also raised similar issues:

"What I mean is I regularly have to send take down notices not only for people
using my name for their music and it appearing on my artist page but for
people uploading my albums to their page and assumedly having my money
diverted to them until we catch it."

[https://exclaim.ca/music/article/el-
p_rages_out_on_spotify_f...](https://exclaim.ca/music/article/el-
p_rages_out_on_spotify_for_not_protecting_artists_from_fraud)

------
jasonlingx
Soundrop and Amuse.io are 2 free alternatives that distribute to a range of
platforms. And this is a pretty comprehensive and objective overview of them
all: [https://aristake.com/post/cd-baby-tunecore-ditto-
mondotunes-...](https://aristake.com/post/cd-baby-tunecore-ditto-mondotunes-
zimbalam-or)

~~~
zimpenfish
I've used Amuse for two tracks (easily findable if you like minimalist dark
ambient noisescapes) and ... it's fiddly (lots of form fields and you need
your tracks in Dropbox/iCloud) but , barring an approval snafu for track 2
which got sorted out after I bitched at them on Twitter and their insanely
long 30 day release window, it's working ok.

------
rectang
There are always the distribution broker services (DistroKid, CDBaby,
TuneCore...) but they can go bad.

I've contemplated 1) writing some open source quality control software for
scanning music distribution uploads, and 2) forming a collective (probably
501(c)(3) charity non-profit) which would serve in the distribution broker
role and redistribute income.

I wonder if such things could ever come to pass. Any thoughts?

~~~
neka
What problem are you trying to solve?

~~~
rectang
The unreliability of distribution brokers as artist allies.

~~~
neka
Where has this come up? Not all distributors work direct with artists.
Bandcamp is proprietary, for profit and seems to have strong artist allies.

~~~
rectang
TuneCore changing its pricing structure a number of years ago is probably the
classic example.

An artist can jump ship to another distribution broker, but there are a lot of
downsides such as losing play counts and breaking links.

Can any of the distribution brokers be trusted to act in an artist's interest
indefinitely? There's just an inherent problem with that.

~~~
neka
If you retain your ISRCs and UPCs when moving from one distributor to another,
links and stream counts will remain as is.

Surely that's an issue solved by the market, if there is a distributor that is
reliable & fairly priced then people will move to use and stay with them. I
think the current issue is that a lot of the big name distributors are
marketers first, distributors second.

~~~
rectang
Since when are non-profits not part of the market?

No commercial distributor can hold out forever against the temptation
expanding into marketing. That's as hopeless as wishing that ISPs would stay
as dumb pipes.

There should be _more_ competition: a non-profit which offers fewer features
but which you aren't constantly wondering when it will flip and screw you
over, versus more featureful and slicker commercial competition.

~~~
neka
They're not, but I don't see how it being non-profit would make a difference
to the problems you're suggesting. You can be for-profit and still have a
sustainable, fair and innovative model.

By marketing I mean marketing themselves as a service, not marketing the music
they handle.

~~~
rectang
> a sustainable, fair and innovative model

Until ownership or management changes. Or has a change of heart. Or gets
squeezed by an aggressive competitor.

Long term relationships with companies are fraught. Establishing vendor lockin
followed by exploitation is a proven-successful business stratagem.

Once it becomes expensive for customers to leave a service, it is perpetually
tempting to dial up the cost of the service until just below the point where
customers bolt. The more painful you can make it to leave, the more you can
wring from them.

Even if the company you're doing business with isn't exploiting you today,
you'd be well advised to check back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the
day after that...

Or better, to avoid forming such long term relationships with entities that
are perpetually at risk of going bad.

I worked in the music industry for 6 years. There are so many people in that
space who want to do the right thing, who attempt to do something
"sustainable, fair and innovative" — yet the marketplace sadly and stubbornly
resists their efforts, corrupting them or crushing them. Where are all the
benevolent record labels that ought to exist, by your logic?

By having this entity be a member-governed cooperative, you take on a
different set of problems. (I've served on the board of a large 501(c)(3) so
I'm well acquainted with the frustrations.) But at least you avoid the
terrible misalignment of incentives that comes from relying on a profit-driven
middleman over the long term.

~~~
neka
A lot of the new players (~past decade) are VC funded and/or starting off in a
highly saturated market, needing to landgrab as many artists & labels as
possible to establish themselves. So they end up prioritising marketing their
service via slick onboarding, PR campaigns, unsustainable offers (see Stem)
and cash advances. A couple years down the line they usually fall short of
their core model or pivot, as you say, dialling up the cost of the service.

Always enjoy seeing services tout the 'keep 100% of your royalties' when they
pipe everything through a third party like CI who take a percentage upfront.

Yes I've seen a handful of services across the years with the "sustainable,
fair and innovative" USP, often run by volunteers and withering out after a
short time. I'm not too sure on the potential of these as they end up being
top heavy, with more artists and labels onboard than paying customers / fans.
The only people that seem to have got this balance right is Bandcamp, at the
cost of 15% of your revenue.

I've dealt with a distributor who have been around for decades (physical &
digital) and sit under the radar, not focussed on growth, soley relying on
word of mouth referrals with high profile, revenue generating clients for
years. They're not the cheapest on %age, but are reliable, transparent and are
well respected for the curation of clients (no open door policy) so as with
everything - you get what you pay for. So they do exist, but you won't hear
them shouting their own name.

As for labels, I know of plenty who offer a fair deal for artists who end up
staying with them in the long term. It's just the bad apples, usually the
majors, who have the leverage to offer unscrupulous deals which all comes out
in the press when the artists realise how bad the deal was years down the line
and they're contracted in for another 10 years.

------
cryptofits
Too bad... That's one of the things I liked about Spotify

It gave opportunity for small artists to share their talent

~~~
fb03
There are still several services that "automagically" publish your music to
several platforms at once.

Some are pretty affordable, like DITTOMUSIC

[https://www.dittomusic.com/pricing](https://www.dittomusic.com/pricing)

~~~
neka
[https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.dittomusic.com](https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.dittomusic.com)

~~~
fb03
Thank you.

Any good alternatives?

~~~
parksy
Distrokid - [https://distrokid.com](https://distrokid.com)

Have used it for over a year, works well, simple upload process, gets out to
all the stores quickly, and annual fees are very reasonable.

------
snowwolf
I’m not familiar with the process, but could there also have been a fraud
aspect (not copyright) to this that wasn’t worth the effort required to
prevent? Upload “songs”, generate lots of listens, get paid.

~~~
beckler
Yes, I hope so, because fraud is a huge issue with Spotify.

An older acquaintance of mine is a professional musician living in Nashville
doing commissions.

He made a track for a trailer of a video game, but chose not to publish it on
Spotify (for reasons I don't know). One of the fans ripped the song from the
trailer, uploaded it to Spotify, and was collecting all the royalties.

Even though Spotify keeps taking it down, someone else uploads it again, ad
nauseam.

~~~
snowwolf
Yeah, the uploading of copyright infringing content is one aspect, but I was
also wondering about just uploading rubbish and somehow generating fake
listens or tricking real users into listening to your track (game the ranking
algorithms to get it into recommended playlists) to get royalties.

Something like the Amazon ebook scams:

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-
dol...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-
amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/)

[https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/amazon-book-stuffing-
author...](https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/amazon-book-stuffing-authors-scam-
chance-carter-romance-kindle-unlimited.html)

------
rhamzeh
Google did the same a couple of months back[1].

Is there a reason these companies are actively against independent artists
being able to upload the music directly?

[1]([https://9to5google.com/2019/04/03/google-play-music-
shutdown...](https://9to5google.com/2019/04/03/google-play-music-shutdown-
starts/))

~~~
nullify88
Perhaps pressure from record labels? I hope artists can flock to somewhere
like Bandcamp, or alternatives.

~~~
fnordsensei
This is pretty much the default answer to all such questions, unless directly
proven to be otherwise.

The last thing they would want is for Spotify, or anyone else, to effectively
become a record label in their own right.

~~~
moftz
Plenty of companies will mass upload your music to all of the streaming sites
for like $20-30/year which sounds pretty cheap compared to the old days of
needing a record label to do anything other than play in bars. Those companies
aren't considered record labels, they are distributors which is almost what
Spotify is doing. Some of those distributors offer engineering and marketing
services too but it still doesn't make them record labels. There are so many
record labels out there that there really isn't an issue with another smaller
one popping up.

~~~
fnordsensei
I'm sure they're fine with the small fish. But with Spotify, Apple, and others
who might have the financial muscles to become a threat if given the chance?
I'm not so sure.

------
djsumdog
This is what happens when you rent your music.

I'm glad I never had a Spotify account. I always either buy CDs from shows or
get them off Bandcamp. I prefer Bandcamp because they take a smaller cut (15%,
as low as 10% if you have a label which high volume) and really hate it when
an artist I like only has the option of Apple/Google/Amazon (all which take
~30% or more).

I just went from a 200GB microsd card to a 512gb, and can carry all my music
in my phone, ready for offline playback, where ever I go.

~~~
proxygeek
A streaming service is _not_ just a collection of your favourite songs.
Content discovery and auto-playlist are some of the not so easily
irreplaceable featured offered by the likes of Spotify.

And anyway, the diss about ownership Vs rental is far too broad a swipe for
the topic at hand.

------
macinjosh
Wasn't Spotify just complaining that Apple's App Store policies hurts
consumers? The shoe seems to be on the other foot now. This policy hurts both
independent artists and consumers. Not to mention this policy stems from
unnecessary government regulations that benefit only large players in the
music industry.

------
unparagoned
Is this just a way to outsource quality control. Making sure meta data was
correct, accurate, etc.

------
aaronarduino
If others are looking to move away from Spotify, here is a comparison of what
streaming services pay artists per stream.

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-
music-...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-
services-pay-2019/)

------
bitL
New mafia is merging with the old mafia... "Wonderful" end to dreams about
technology enabling better world...

------
yason
If, for once, you can get of all the middlemen it allows you to create your
own.

------
jakubp
Why do you guys speculate what the reasons are instead of just asking Spotify?

------
adam0c
I guess that means we cant upload tool anymore under other names

~~~
sk0g
Really wish Spotify did the Google Play Music thing of letting you upload a
few thousand songs to fill in the gaps in their library.

From what I can tell, they sorta do - they let you add songs on your device,
but I haven't been able to find them in my app sooo :|

~~~
Nightshaxx
The way they impliment it is pretty bad. Basically you have to add a local
music folder on your PC, then you have to use the search tool to find it (on
PC) and add it to a playlist. Then you have to go onto your mobile while on
the same network as the PC, and download the playlist.

Spotify doesn't store your song at all on their servers (unlike google) and if
you want to re-download the files on a new device, the original pc that had it
has to still be there or else you have to redo the whole thing.

~~~
nicky0
It's clumsy but you can see why Spotify don't want anything to do with
handling uploaded music on their servers. I wonder how Google treats it from a
legal/copyright perspective. I suspect they are just too big to care.

------
scelerat
Artists uploading directly would threaten the monopoly major labels have on
distribution relationships.

