Spotify is one of the world’s leading platforms when it comes to music, so if you’re an up and coming artist then it’s one of the most popular places to upload your music. But among the various places to share your music with the world from Apple Music to Soundcloud to giving people CDs on the street– why Spotify?
The truth is that Spotify is an incredibly popular place for music. Even if you don’t use it personally, it serves to remember that the platform has about 640 million active users. And there are about 8 million artists, too. Granted, the grand majority of those artists have less than 10 songs or have less than 50 monthly listeners– but the point is that people know and use Spotify. Ask ten people in your life whether or not they know Spotify and I all but guarantee that most of them if not all of them will say yes. Even if your chances of getting noticed are more or less the same, it’s an incredible amount of users who might potentially stumble upon your work, and that can only be good for you.
Spotify, for better or for worse, has a habit of coughing up random songs for users based on their previous tastes. So if your songs fit a particular vibe, fans of that vibe may end up hearing your music and they might even like it! And considering the enormous number of people on the platform, a good amount of people could hear what you have created.
In addition, the process is easier than you might think. While it’s not necessarily a walk in the park, it’s not super involved on your end. All you need to do is make the music. And pay a little bit, but if you’re successful then those costs should hardly matter. We’ll get into that later.
So in essence: It has a lot of potential, it’s simple, and it’s cheap! That’s the why of the matter. If you’re not convinced, then go on Spotify right now and let random songs play and see how many names you have never heard will show up. And then remember you’re one person seeing that out of hundreds of millions. At the very least, it’s worth a try.
Now that you definitely want to try uploading your music to Spotify, let’s go over the how. The process is relatively simple, the hardest part doesn’t even involve the platform itself.
First of all, have music you want to upload to Spotify. Presumably, you’re already at this step if you’re reading this at all. If not, go ahead and get started! Programs like NCH or Splice or even GarageBand on your iPhone (because statistically, that’s the phone that you have) can help you make music, and there’s bound to be plenty more programs if you look deeper. You could even get a bunch of microphones and real instruments and just play them for real!
You should have audio files of the music you want to upload, but there are some specifications to keep in mind. Spotify requires .wav format files, with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and 16-bit resolution. This is the standard across all songs on Spotify and ensures the quality of sound that you hear whenever you listen to songs on the platform. But once you have that, you’ve done eighty percent of the work. Good job!
Next, you need to choose a distributor. Spotify is not the direct distributor of the music, and so it works through a variety of other channels by which to get their music from artists. Spotify’s website has a launchpad for artists to get started with a distributor. There are a bunch of different distributors, like DistroKid or TuneCore or many others, and they each function a bit differently. DistroKid is cheap, easy, and popular, while CD Baby offers physical CDs of your work. Amuse is free! At the end of the day, it’s up to you which one you end up rolling with, so take your time perusing your options. You just need to make an account with whatever Distributor you end up with! You may have to give them some financial information as they may or may not end up paying royalties.
After that, you can upload your songs to Spotify through your distributor of choice. Just add the files, and provide all the necessary details. Then you just need to wait for it to go live! It can take a couple days, so just be patient.
And then you’re in the hands of Lady Luck, but don’t sit back and keep uploading songs to no audience. Spotify gives artists tools to help promote their music and get it heard, and you can separately cultivate a presence on social media to give your music a boost. Many artists have popular Instagram accounts through which people can discover their music. You can too! And don’t forget, there are plenty of ways to promote your music for free.
But at the end of the day, it is up to you what platform you choose to put your music on. But if you do choose Spotify, now you know how. Even if you have another platform lined up, you could always just also put it on Spotify. It can’t hurt, especially because of how many people could hear your music on one of the largest platforms out there for little to no cost in return to you.
If you liked this article, and want more tips on the world of music marketing, here is an article about whether or not a music marketing degree can help you get your music out there.
