Spotify takes a stake in DistroKid, will support cross-platform music downloads in Spotify for artists – TechCrunch



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Spotify has taken a minority stake in the music distribution service, DistroKid, a popular tool used by artists to download their music on different platforms. The company did not confirm the size of its stake, simply stated that it had made a "passive minority investment". Following this agreement, Spotify will also upgrade its Spotify for Artists service to integrate with DistroKid. this allows artists to simultaneously download content on other platforms.

"Over the last five years, DistroKid has been a must-have service for hundreds of thousands of independent artists, helping them to stream their tracks to digital music services around the world and reach fans regardless of their choice." announced the company. in a blog post on the transaction.

Spotify was already a partner of DistroKid before this news. However, the DistroKid service currently offers musicians an easy way to get their voice heard by Spotify's competitors, including Apple, Amazon, Google Play, TIDAL, iHeartRadio, YouTube, Pandora, Deezer and more than 150 other streaming music stores. .

Given the formerly agnostic position of DistroKid in the sector, Spotify's investment should be a sensation. For now, it's unclear how Spotify's rivals will react to this decision.

Spotify refused to disclose the financial details, at the request of TechCrunch, but a spokesman said he had not acquired the company, had no seat on the board and that DistroKid remained independent. He also stated that he did not have the right to view data from other digital service providers and DistroKid would not share any confidential information.

When asked if it was planned to take a reduction in sales of DistroKid subscriptions, currently at $ 19.99 per year, Spotify said it did not have this information to offer at the moment. "We will announce all the details when we are ready to open the integration to the artists," we were told.

It therefore seems that Spotify – at least for the moment – wanted to largely consolidate its relationship with DistroKid for the planned work on future technical integrations, in addition to the establishment of a broader commercial relationship in general.

Spotify has announced the upcoming launch of a new tool that will allow musicians to download on DistroKid via Spotify for Artists.

Launched in beta last year, Spotify for Artists is the online dashboard of the streaming service that allows musicians and their management teams to easily update their profile information, track their feeds and to know more about their fan base. In September 2018, Spotify announced a major new feature for the service: music downloads. The company said artists could use a beta download feature to send their songs directly to Spotify, edit metadata around those files, and track song performance.

The integration of DistroKid will complement this new feature by offering the ability to download elsewhere.

Spotify did not say when he hoped the integrations would go into production, but only in the "near future".

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