Spotify buys a stake in DistroKid 🎵💸

In the month it celebrates ten years in business, Spotify has announced that it has bought a small stake in DistroKid, a music distribution service widely used by artists to upload their music to several platforms.

The company has not yet confirmed the size of the deal, saying only that it was a "minority investment". As a result of the deal, Spotify will upgrade its artist-only accounts, including an integration with DistroKid that will let artists upload content to Spotify and other platforms at the same time.

"For the past five years, DistroKid has played a very important role for hundreds of thousands of independent musicians, helping them distribute their work to digital services around the world and reach fans, however they listen to music," the company said in a blog post about the deal. Spotify, however, was already a DistroKid partner long before this news became public.

Of course, DistroKid's service let musicians easily put their work on Spotify's competitors, including Apple, Amazon, Google Play, TIDAL, iHeartRadio, Youtube, Pandora, Deezer and more than 150 other music streaming platforms and stores.

By giving DistroKid a stronger position in the industry, Spotify's investment may cause some controversy. So far, none of its rivals have reacted to this market move. The company declined to discuss any financial details, but a spokesperson made clear to journalists that it has not acquired DistroKid, does not have a seat on the board and that DistroKid remains independent. The spokesperson also stated that buying a small stake will not give Spotify access to any data from other digital service providers and that confidential information will not be shared.

When asked whether it plans to take a share of DistroKid's subscription sales, which currently cost around 20 euros a year, Spotify said it had no answer yet. "We'll share all the details when we're ready to open the integration to artists," it said.

It seems Spotify has wanted to strengthen its relationship with DistroKid for some time. With this deal, the music streaming service will add a new tool that lets artists upload to DistroKid through Spotify for Artists.

This feature for professionals launched in beta last year and lets artists (and their managers) update their profile information, analyse data about their songs and get insights into their fan base. Then, in September, Spotify announced another big new feature: music could now be uploaded directly, metadata could be edited and the performance of each track could be viewed.

So the DistroKid integration will complement this tool, offering the option to upload to other platforms as well. There is no date yet for the integration to go live publicly, but it will surely be soon.