Tag: spotify for artists

3 Major Streaming Trends from Spotify’s First Year in India

February 27, 2020

It’s been exactly 12 months since Spotify launched in India, and my, how we’ve grown. There are now more than 6,400 Indian creators using Spotify for Artists, our platform that lets artists and their teams see who’s listening to their music and take control of their artist profile. Listeners from over 2,300 cities are tuning into more than 350 curated playlists in India—like New Music Hindi and Punjabi 101—and that’s up from 120 at launch. In honor of this anniversary, we dove into some of the trends and themes around a year’s worth of Spotify streaming in India. Here’s what we saw:

1. A lot of love for local artists

Spotify listeners in India have streamed over 130 artists each in the past year. Overall, we found that the top five most-streamed in the country are from India. Topping the list are three beloved Bollywood singers: Arijit Singh, Tanishk Bagchi, and Neha Kakkar. The age group of 35 to 44-year-olds stream Indian artists at a higher rate than any other.

Globally streamed hits are also very popular in India. The most-streamed international artist in India is Post Malone, who was also Spotify’s most-streamed global artist in 2019; BTS and Taylor Swift are popular with Indian listeners as well. The most-streamed track in India over the past year is the global smash “Señorita” by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, followed by Arijit Singh and Mithoon’s “Tujhe Kitna Chahne Lage” and Sachet Tandon and Parampara Thakur’s “Bekhayali” (both from the soundtrack to the popular Indian film “Kabir Singh”).

2. Music sets the mood

Love songs are a major part of Indian culture, which is why Spotify’s Bollywood Mush playlist is one of the top-streamed playlists among users. Interestingly, listeners in the eastern part of the country—West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, and Sikkim—have streamed the playlist the most (it seems love rises in the east!).

What’s more, during Diwali, India’s biggest religious celebration, the holiday’s themed playlists—which lean heavily on songs about love and partying—got major traction on the festival’s peak day on October 27, 2019, with plays increasing by almost 4,400%.

 3. Pressing play on podcasts and pop

India has fired up its podcast lineup, launching its first three Spotify original podcasts in December 2019. 22 Yarns With Gaurav Kapur, Bhaskar Bose, and Love Aaj Kal with Aastha & Ankit were each produced in India to cater to an Indian audience. These podcasts, which are all about pop culture, including cricket, fiction thriller storytelling, and relationship advice, respectively, also made it to the top five on the original podcast charts. 

The top three music genres streamed across India are pop, filmi (music from popular Indian movies) and hip-hop. K-Pop also has a growing fan base: Spotify’s most-followed K-Pop playlist, K-Pop Daebak, is a popular choice for Indian listeners. And India is in the top 22% of K-Pop listening in all of Spotify’s markets globally, based on streaming from the past 90 days. 

From the top-streamed artists to the most popular podcasts in India, see how listening stacks up since we launched in February 2019.

Download the infographic here.

For the uninitiated, be sure to stream Spotify’s Top Hits Hindi playlist. 

Spotify Announces Acquisition of Global Audio Services Marketplace SoundBetter

September 12, 2019

Today, Spotify is excited to announce that we’re acquiring SoundBetter, a leading global music and audio production and collaboration marketplace. SoundBetter offers creators—including singers, songwriters, producers, mixing/mastering engineers, and session musicians—a place to connect with each other and hire services from fellow artists to create and perfect their tracks.

Because of its strong reputation and dedicated commitment to supporting all creators worldwide, SoundBetter already has more than 180,000 registered users in 176 countries and 14,000 cities across the globe. The acquisition reinforces the deep connection between Spotify and the broader music industry, as SoundBetter makes it easy for labels and artists to source a wide array of music services.

We sat down with the founders, CEO Shachar Gilad and CTO Itamar Yunger, to learn more about the company.

Shachar Gilad and Itamar Yunger

What are some of the benefits for artists who use SoundBetter?

Shachar: Imagine being in Japan and being able to hire a songwriter from LA who worked on your favorite song, or being in Germany and getting your track mixed by a Grammy Award winner from New York, or being in LA and having a string quartet from Hungary record tracks on your record. SoundBetter helps fill the gap between recording and distribution. It’s relatively easy to record music, but difficult to get your music to sound good enough for distribution. We connect artists with the top music pros who can help them sound the best that they can, so they can focus on whatever they do best, whether that’s songwriting, singing, or producing. 

At the same time we help music pros connect with clients from across the country and across the world they would never have met otherwise and earn a living.

How did you discover there was a need for something like SoundBetter?

Shachar: I had many friends who are engineers and producers who were interested in marketing to artists outside of their local or existing client base. They knew they had something to offer artists everywhere, but didn’t know how to reach them. At the same time, the number of artists self-producing has grown dramatically.

I realized both sides were looking for each other. Online marketplaces were increasingly addressing this type of fragmentation in other industries, and I decided to tackle this one because it was close to my heart.

What were the early days of SoundBetter like?

Itamar: We started with mixing and mastering engineers and expanded from there. We worked in true lean-startup fashion 15 hours a day to build the marketplace you’re familiar with today, including the talent discovery, payment system, file transfer, workroom and project management tools. 

The work paid off. We were fortunate that we focused on some of the right things. We earned trust and the marketplace grew. As time went by we realized more and more that musicians around the world were really looking for this kind of platform, and that what we built was solving a problem.

How has Spotify changed the audio industry, from your perspective? How does SoundBetter fit into that growth?

Itamar: The way Spotify made music accessible to billions of fans, allowing them to enjoy and be inspired by music, is fantastic. SoundBetter’s mission aligns perfectly with Spotify’s mission of helping creators live off their art. That has been our mission for years.

Shachar: Twenty years ago, only a handful of artists ever got to record any of their music. Now millions of artists are recording their music on digital audio workstations, and have the platform to make that music available to the whole world with Spotify. That is a tectonic shift. 

We’ve seen many songs produced with SoundBetter pros that each now have tens of millions of streams on Spotify. This collaboration will help drive more quality content to Spotify’s hundreds of millions of listeners while helping artists earn a living.

What are your goals and expectations for this new chapter with Spotify?

Shachar: We’re really thrilled at the opportunity to take SoundBetter to the next level with Spotify. One of the things that kept us going through this startup rollercoaster over the past few years is hearing stories from artists who tell us we’ve changed their lives. Talented folks who, thanks to SoundBetter, quit their day jobs and are doing music full time and earning a respectable living. We’ve heard endless personal stories like that, and there’s nothing more rewarding. We truly believe that with Spotify, we can make the number of artists who have such stories much, much bigger.

Itamar: A significant percentage of marketplace sales on the platform is international. Just think of what we will be able to do in the audio industry as a part of the Spotify brand. We are thrilled with that potential. 

Want to learn more? Check out the press release here and blog post from Spotify for Artists here.

Our Playlist Submission Feature is Officially Out of Beta

October 24, 2018

This post first appeared on Spotify for Artists:

Our playlist submission feature is officially out of beta.

A few months ago, we unveiled a beta feature in the Spotify for Artists tool that gives artists, labels, and teams the ability to share new music directly with our editorial team for playlist consideration. Since the feature became available in July more than 67,000 artists and labels have submitted music and now we’re excited to announce our playlist submission feature is officially out of beta.

Since the beta began, over 10,000 artists have been added to Spotify editorial playlists for the first time, connecting their music with thousands of new fans. To offer just a few examples, when acoustic troubadour Gustavo Bertoni’s song “Be Here Now” was selected to appear on the Acoustic Morning and Fresh Folk playlists, his monthly listeners jumped from 7,000 to 617,000. Elsewhere alt-rock band Yonaka, hailing from Brighton in the UK, saw their numbers increase from 82,000 to a whopping 290,000 when they were added to New Music Friday, while the Belgian rapper Bryan Mg shot up to 33,000 monthly listeners up from 4,600 after landing on the La Vida Loca playlist.

“After the first release got picked up by Spotify I think about a month later I got my first booking for a club show,” recalls Mg. “People also started to send me private messages on Instagram about where they heard my music for the first time. I also received invitations for radio stations in the Netherlands and in Belgium and saw my followers on Instagram and Spotify get a boost.”

Pop newcomer Jayden Bartels explains, “Seeing my music on Spotify for the first time was so exciting, but to see that ‘Can’t Help Me Now’ made Spotify’s official playlists New Music Friday and Pop Sauce was absolutely incredible! New Music Friday features my favorite artists every week and to see my name on that playlist was crazy and such an honor!”

When her song “Can’t Help Me Now” was featured on New Music Friday, her monthly listeners practically tripled to 72,000. Prior to utilizing this new feature her music had never been added to an official Spotify playlist.

Seeing these kinds of numbers and hearing this kind of feedback makes us very happy, and while we can’t guarantee them for every artist, every time, what’s especially great about this new tool is, whether your new song is featured in an editorial playlist or not, it’ll always show up in all of your followers’ Release Radar playlists. Plus, the additional metadata you provide when you upload it will help us recommend it to potential new fans for years to come.

We know you’ve been asking for more information about how our playlists work. That’s why to celebrate coming out of beta, we’ve made a couple new episodes of our original series, The Game Plan.

Spotify for Artists Announces Upcoming Integration with DistroKid

October 17, 2018

Today, we’re happy to announce plans to enhance Spotify for Artists by enabling artists who upload to Spotify, via our recently announced beta feature, to seamlessly distribute their music to other platforms through DistroKid.

For the past five years, DistroKid has served as a go-to service for hundreds of thousands independent artists, helping them deliver their tracks to digital music services around the world, and reaching fans however they choose to consume music. The service has been a trusted and reliable partner to Spotify, which is why they’re a natural choice to enhance the experience for artists using our beta upload feature. As part of this partnership, Spotify has made a passive minority investment in DistroKid.

We’re excited to roll out this new technical integration in the near future, and hope to share more information soon.

Now in Beta: Upload Your Music in Spotify for Artists

September 20, 2018

This post first appeared on Spotify for Artists:

Today, we’re announcing a new beta feature that enables independent artists to upload their music to Spotify — directly from Spotify for Artists.

Since we launched Spotify for Artists, one of the top requested features has been the ability to upload music directly onto Spotify. You’ve told us time and time again that sharing your work with the world should be easier. In the past few months, we’ve been testing an upload tool within Spotify for Artists, because we believe getting new music to your fans should be simple. Starting today we’re inviting more artists to participate in the beta.

We worked with a handful of independent artists—like Noname, Michael Brun, VIAA, and Hot Shade—to make sure we kept your needs in mind. Their feedback was instrumental in shaping the feature, and now we’re ready to see how a wider range of artists will put it to use.

How it works.

You’ll be able to deliver music straight to Spotify and plan for the perfect release day. You’ll see a preview of exactly how things will appear to listeners before you hit submit. And even after your music goes live, you’ll be in full control of your metadata with simple and quick edits.

Just like releasing through any other partner, you’ll get paid when fans stream your music on Spotify. Your recording royalties will hit your bank account automatically each month, and you’ll see a clear report of how much your streams are earning right next to the other insights you already get from Spotify for Artists. Uploading is free to all artists, and Spotify doesn’t charge you any fees or commissions no matter how frequently you release music.

Want in?

Right now, upload in Spotify for Artists is only available by invitation to a few hundred US-based independent artists, but we’re excited to bring upload to even more artists, labels, and teams in the future.

Over the next few months, we’ll ask more of you to participate—make sure to join our mailing list so you’ll be the first to know about any new announcements. Remember, you don’t need to wait for an invitation to release your music—this is just one of many ways you can get your music on Spotify. You can learn more by checking out the Spotify for Artists guide.