On September 20, Spotify made a surprise announcement that will now allow indie artists to bypass music distributors such as CD Baby, TuneCore, and Stem to upload their songs directly to the platform.
The new upload feature will be available via the Spotify For Artists section of the website where 200,000 artists are currently on.
While the new direct upload feature is still in Beta mode and only available to certain users right now, this may cause a bigger ripple in the music industry than expected.
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Spotify's Competition
While some music distributors tend to charge $20 for the whole year and do not take a royalty, Spotify is correct in thinking that many artists may in fact upload their music directly to Spotify and not worry about the other streaming platforms. As Apple Music touts 40 million songs on its platform and Spotify has just a mere 30 million, the new feature may drastically increase the amount of songs on Spotify as a whole. Let alone the dramatic impact this move may have on SoundCloud.
While Spotify continues their battle in the streaming music space, it'll be interesting to see what the long-term effects are of this new move.
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