The ultimate Spotify guide for the starting artist 🚀

We all know the music industry had drastically changed in the past few years.

Musicians are much more independent than before, they can sell their music online, distribute it in two clicks and promote every new track to millions of social media users.

As many musicians would argue, the greatest change might be the rise of paid streaming. The streaming model creates a unique opportunity for a musician, each play results in the performing artist getting royalties.

The paid streaming market is a busy one.

Several key players are dictating the pace, and out of the top contenders It’s no secret Spotify is the most popular among music consumers.

The service has now close to 345M users from which 155M are paid; It had started trends and is the catalyst behind many musician career launches. (data from Wallstreet Zen)

Due to its size Spotify provides a powerful springboard for the starting musician.

Spotify can provide both a source of income and a way for the artist to reach new audiences. It’s different services such as their artist dashboard, the Discover Weekly algorithm and Spotifys’ curated playlists all can kickstart a musician’s career.

Knowing the power of the streaming giant, our goal in this post is to provide a complete Spotify guide for starting musicians who aim to get the most out of their music.

This guide is full of details,hacks and tutorials every starting musician should know - from getting your music to streaming platforms to different ways to scale and grow your Spotify audience.

Now, when you understand the impact a spotify profile might have, it’s time to get things going!

First step, get your music to Spotify!

If you are signed at a label or any aggregator, this is very simple, you do your thing and they’ll take care of this for you.

If you’re 100% independent, you’ll need to tackle distribution on your own..

What’s distribution?

“The process of delivering your music to consumers” as said by Heather McDonald from The Balance Careers.

Before the rise of online streaming and digital music sales a distributor’s job was mostly taking care of printing records, cds and cassettes.

Nowadays, physical music sales are rapidly decreasing. Distributors quickly evolved and now they mostly take care of digital distribution, delivering artists’ music to services like Spotify, apple music, tidal, deezer, shazam, amazon prime and google music, where it is either streamed on demand or purchased.

Besides the act of spreading one’s music the distributor often takes care of music licensing - which to cut things short - is the act of making sure your music is registered under your own name so you’ll be rewarded with royalties whenever someone is using / listening to your music.

Once your song had been streamed or downloaded the distributor will take care of collecting your royalties, meaning that they’ll make sure you get paid (after most of them take a hefty cut).

Now, that you know licensing / distribution basic let’s land you a distribution deal!