Spotify for Artists

This week, Ari discusses his recent Variety article entitled “Why Spotify’s New Payment Model Falls Short For Emerging Artists.”

Spotify just rolled this out to help you better understand how active your listeners are. But why does it matter and how does it help?

Releasing music today is vastly different from releasing music even just 5 years ago. It's no longer about release week. It's now about release year. There are extremely important steps to take before *and after* the release of each single and album to make sure you have the biggest effect.

Discovery Mode is basically a program where Spotify will help get you more listeners by inserting your songs into other artists’ radio stations and general “autoplay” sessions - for an additional commission. More on the commission part in a minute. 

Jason Grishkoff started a music blog called Indie Shuffle back in 2007, when music blogs were still cool. After a 3-year stint at Google, he was lucky to take the blog full-time in 2013. From 2014 to 2015 digital advertising in the music industry changed rapidly, and a number of bloggers found themselves looking for alternative sources of income. Many gave up to focus on their day jobs, but Jason decided to double-down on his coding abilities and created a website called SubmitHub, where musicians, labels and publicists could submit their songs to blogs like Indie Shuffle. Flash forward to 2022 and nearly 30 million submissions have been submitted through the platform. Jason still runs the operation as the only developer, and the product is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the modern music promotion industry.

Spotify just announced that this year’s Wrapped, fans will get personalized messages from their favorite artists. 

Joining us this week is Sam Duboff, the Director and Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing at Spotify! In this episode, Ari and Sam dive deep into everything about Spotify for Artists’ promotional tools, editorial vs. algorithmic playlists, production credits, payment structure, and much more.