Artist friendly platforms: the introduction
There’s a lot of different technology platforms to choose from, when it comes to releasing your musical work independently. Do you need to be on all of them, none of them, or just a few?
This is a super individual question that every artist will answer differently. So, in this series we’re going over some of the various music distribution platforms you could choose from. Hopefully, by the end, you’ll have a better sense of which platforms make sense as a place for your music to be, in your individual case. This won’t be a fully comprehensive listing, so do your own research, but it’s a good place to get started when considering how to evaluate any given platform.
Defining features of any artist friendly platform
Dig deep enough into the terms and conditions, and you’ll notice that most artist friendly platforms tend to have one thing in common.
The ability for an artist to own the audience they earn, in collaboration with the platform, is a defining feature of an artist-friendly platform.
When the platform hoards or restricts the connection to your audience, big red flag.
Your audience (or “fanbase” to use a term from 20 years ago) is the most valuable part of your creative business. All platforms know this.
So, if a platform attempts to lock down or restrict control of that audience (by not allowing you to export, know, or directly contact your followers off of the platform, for example), you can be sure that platform is operating in its own best interests over yours.
Examples of artist friendly platforms
I’d consider a platform like Bandcamp artist friendly, because you own the audience that you earn on that platform forever. You get a list of email addresses of your fans that follow you, and you can always export it and contact them directly, if you want to. If you ever want to leave Bandcamp, you can take your audience with you.
Examples of artist unfriendly platforms
On Spotify, in contrast, you have no idea who your fans really are, and no way to contact them outside of the platform. All you see is your current “monthly listener count”, which is composed of who knows what. The analytics on the backend don’t get much more specific when it comes to individual fans-they show general trends but no specific info.
Soundbetter is another tech platform used for booking music production talent, but they’re also pretty gross about this. If you read their terms of service, they can actually fine you $1000+ per violation for any customers that book with you directly, if they ever booked you on Soundbetter at any point in the past, in perpetuity.
Is this something legally enforceable? I’m not a lawyer, but probably not. It’ll cost you a lot of money and an expensive legal battle to find out. Soundbetter certainly knows this, and the fact that they include this language in their terms anyway is quite telling as to where their priorities truly lie.
Artist friendly platforms always let you own the audience that you earn on the platform, and this is a fair exchange for the often free work you’re doing for them as the artist. Unfair platforms do not.
Next time in this series, we’ll apply this concept to some current musical distribution platforms you might choose to use to get your music out there.
