Spotify changed its mind: it won't be a distributor

Spotify has officially reversed its decision to become a distributor of music, announcing that it’s closing its Upload Beta Program for independent artists.

Spotify changed its mind: it won't be a distributor

Spotify, last year, announced that it was enabling artists to upload their music direct to the platform.

This feature launched in Beta in September 2018. A month later, Spotify doubled down, revealing that it had acquired a stake in Distrokid, with a plan to allow artists to not only directly upload to Spotify via the platform, but an array of rival services like Apple Music and TIDAL, too. Now the streaming coloss officially reversed its decision to become a distributor of music, announcing that it’s closing its Upload Beta Program for independent artists.

With a blog post addressing the decision, Spotify stated:

Today, we notified participating artists about our decision to close the beta program, along with how we can help them migrate their music to other distributors over the next month.

Moreover, Spotify noted that “insights and feedback” it received from artists in the beta led to these two key conclusions:

  • The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community. Over the past year, we’ve vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more.
  • The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them — like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months.