Spotify Doesn’t Want To Be A Music Distributor After All

Last year Spotify announced that it purchased a portion of music distributor DistroKid, and that would mean that its users would soon be able to distribute their music to platforms other than Spotify. The company has apparently thought better of the move, however, and announced that it’s closing its Upload Beta Program for independent artists.

The Upload Program was really only rolled out to a minority of Spotify users and was never officially launched, although it was anticipated that move could happen at any time. Instead came an official statement that stated:

“The insights and feedback we received from artists in the beta led us to believe:

The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community. Over the past year, we’ve vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more.
The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them — like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months.”

According to Music Business Worldwide, even though there was never a platform-wide launch, there were actually 40,000 tracks being uploaded to the system daily. Spotify found this to be more time and labor-intensive that anticipated, and it wasn’t even charging for it. Considering that the company has yet to make a profit and anything losing money has the potential for pushback from Wall Street, there was little upside to offering the feature.

The company stated that it will stop taking uploads at the end of the month and would help users transition to a new distributor. These are the platform’s “preferred distributors.”