There was also a two year period to adapt. Everyone scrambled to do it in last week, or last few days.
there could be plenty of reasons: it didn't bring them expected revenue, that team was allocated something with higher business priority while the feature itself required updates etc.
It's a service very few people use that costs them money to maintain and support. You already need to go through cdbaby and similar services for all other distributions and being just on spotify instead of all of them is not very appealing.
I'm not a Spotify expert so I'm not understanding why independents artist without labels "costs money to maintain support" that isn't already spent to enable the labels to upload their artists' songs.
Let's say a Universal Music Group[1] representative logs into Spotify's system to upload Justin Bieber's latest 4-minute song. (Spotify has spent money on their backend system to enable this upload workflow.)
Why does it cost more to Spotify to let the unknown-Joe-Blow-not-signed-to-a-label upload his 4-minute song?
Unless I'm mistaken, Spotify would get the new Bieber automagically via an ERN (Electronic Release Notification) delivery which contains asset links, artist, meta, rights information etc. Since that's from a trusted* source, it can be ingested as-is and everyone is happy. For independent uploads, there's almost certainly several steps of human review and possibly interaction - which costs money and time.
It all boils down to that Joe Blow is an unstrusted actor and big label is not. They needs to check that Joe Blow is not uploading Bieber's latest song as his own and that all the metadata is correct while they not need do that for most labels.
The same type of questioning applied to banks and transferring money:
Why would it cost a bank more money to print and mail checks to individual people when they already do balance transfer payments every night to other banks and branches?
Opening it up to everyone would have transformed the industry. Spotify could absolutely own the small artist space in the same way that Amazon owns the self-publishing space for unsigned authors, but it chooses not to for political reasons.
This has nothing to do with copyright issues. Spotify already has a copyright claim process and the major labels have their own copyright monitoring systems.
I make music as a hobby, and I only really use soundcloud as a result, since the barrier to entry to posting on spotify is annoying, and resultingly a pretty decent chunk of the pretty obscure stuff I like isn't on spotify, only soundcloud.
When I go to spotify right now it feels like this weird corporate arm of the archaic record industry that I view as more or less a parasite on musicians in this day and age. It lacks all of the weird community character and fluidity that I want out of a music platform, and I resist it for that reason.
Opening the gates would change the game and let it exist as a real creative community rather than just a soleless distribution platform for corporate artists and their masters.
[0] https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-fo...
Spotify please hire me so I can work on this, tack.
I'll have to pay a small sum to do the same now, but that's not a big deal.
Spotify is the biggest music streaming platform, and having something I created, or played a part in creating, be on the platform, would be a personal accomplishment. It's just an item on my bucketlist, really. In a similar vein, I want to see somoene sing along to a song I write at a gig :)
Eventually the algorithm might even drop the songs in people's discovery queues, etc. But for fanbase interactions, I think local gigs + a Facebook page is the most important, to be honest. Then you tour and people should be able to discover you on their streaming platform of choice.
I haven't heard of 1000 True Fans, will look into what that is actually.
On the other hand I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of the music streamed by Spotify comes from "the industry" instead of artists uploading their own songs themselves. Implementing complicated filters (and playing the arms race game against people trying to work around them) is probably not worth it for them.
I know some people who are working on something like that with the added benefit* of being on Ethereum if that interests you... :)
I've been thinking about hash values for song sections, and then proving ownership by claiming a sequence of hashes. Could help ensure you aren't subconsciously ripping other music off, and make finding 'related' songs easy (covers, remixes, etc).
My immediate thought on reading the headline was that they didn't want to deal with a ton of individuals w.r.t. payouts and etc. Company to company transactions are always easier, so restrict it to labels.
Is there another plausible reason for Spotify shutting down direct uploads that's unrelated to copyrights?