What is your experience with submitting your own music to Spotify?

May 23, 2018 12:10 PM

I want to submit my own home-recorded music to Spotify via some service like Tunecore or Distrokid and have a few questions for anyone who has done that.

Short version: I have a full album of home-recorded (and then professionally mixed/mastered) music I would love to put out into the world. What's the best way?

I would love for my music to be on Spotify. So I've put together a list of some of the services and compared pricing and features. Distrokid seems impossibly cheap for what you get (100% of royalties, $19.99/yr for unlimited music upload). But there are a few things I don't understand about these services, namely:

• If I do a better mix of a track later down the road, can I replace it in Spotify?
• Can I add new tracks to an album after the fact?
• Where do I insert cover art, artist bio, related artists, etc? Where is the interface for that?

Basically what I'd love is a dashboard interface for me to manage that stuff, but looking at these distro services, I can't tell if they offer something like that.

Also: I would love to attract a small indie label for some of this music. But I know nothing about how that would work. Should I submit to them before even trying to just put my music on Spotify? Or should I have it on Spotify so I can point them to it and demonstrate that the music is getting some clicks and attention first...?

Can anyone who has successfully gotten their music into Spotify tell me about their experiences, pros and cons, etc? Thanks!

posted by deern the headlice to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: As music producer, I've only ever used Distrokid to put my albums on Spotify. I haven't used anything besides Distrokid, so I can't offer any advice with other services, but Distrokid is amazing. The Distrokid UI consists of a main menu showing any of your current works you've submitted to Distrokid, as well as tabs to make a new upload, see your existing music, manage emails to send any revenue to, and upgrade your account. When you want to upload music, it takes you to a form similar to submitting an album on Bandcamp, where you can put in the track names one by one and add song art, as well as titles and descriptions, et cetera. It also let's you as a producer create a Spotify for Artists account very easily, where you can monitor who is playing your tracks on Spotify, as well as where they're from and things like that.

When you submit your work to Distrokid, they send you progressive email notifications as your work gets authorized and sent to the various stores you selected it to be on. The best part about Distrokid is that you can very carefully select which services you want your work on or not via a checklist right at the top of the upload form. Usually your work will appear on Apple Music first, then things like iTunes and Napster. Spotify and Amazon take the longest to authorize works to be on their services, usually taking like a week. If you upgrade your Distrokid account (aka pay more money), I believe you can have more control over the release dates of your works on stores.

As for replacing songs on Spotify with better mixes, I don't think that's a feature. The only music streaming company I know that has a service like that is Soundcloud, and even then they only allow you as a user to replace an existing song with a new audio file if you have a Soundcloud Pro account (which costs a certain rate per month I believe). The same goes for adding more tracks to an already posted album after the fact I think. Hope this helps ya!
posted by tbkepler at 3:48 PM on May 23, 2018 [6 favorites]