Musical Artist Questions for the “DSP”’s (aka Streaming Music Services) — List
Please read / see backgrounder here
List of questions for the DSP panels on 5/5/19 follow
SoundCloud
I am interested in what the best practices are for getting your music included in the “SoundCloud Go” music subscription service and tying that in with your artist account?
We also want to know about the size of the catalog of music on SoundCloud Go+ ??
Are longer tail artists like myself who have a lot of music on SoundCloud Free also making sure their music is available on SoundCloud GO+ ??
Or more specifically — what’s the percentage of SoundCloud Unlimited Pro users that also make sure their music is available on SoundCloud Go+ ??
Last question is to my earlier point — it seems like its been a long time since SoundCloud Unlimited Pro has delivered any new features. Does SoundCloud plan to further develop the platform ??
Amazon Music
Where on their product development roadmap is the ability for independent artists to access their artist profile on Amazon Prime Music ??
So, when will artists be able to add their own hero artist image and add in bios on Amazon Prime Music ??
So the next question for Amazon is: how do you plan to handle “featured artist” content display on an artist profile ??
YouTube Video (YouTube.com) for Music Artists
Do you think fans know what “Artist Name — Topic” really means on YouTube ??
What have you done in the marketplace to explain to consumers what the “Topic” term means in relation to official music on YouTube ??
Do you have any vision for allowing artists to control these “Topic” channels or at least the information about the artist on the “Topic” channel pages ??
Still the burning question for me is — how does YouTube (video) view “Artist Name — Topic” channels — aren’t they somewhat in competition with either Official Artist Channels — or artist run user channels** ??
** ( a work around for those musicians who don’t have a YouTube Official Artist Channel is for them to manage / operate their own user channel with the artist name as the YouTube user name )
In the future do you envision figuring out a way to merge “Topic” channels with “Official Artist Channels” ??
Why does a musician need to have distributed, produced music videos to get access to their “Official Artist Channel” when there is a lot of audio only content that’s officially licensed to YouTube by distributors ??
YouTube is responsible for 47% of music streaming globally according to the IFPI in 2018. Yet when you search for the “music” of longer tail artists, or legacy artists on YouTube VIDEO in most cases you don’t return the “Artist Name — Topic” officially licensed music content. Therefore are there any plans to make it more clear what’s officially licensed music when users make a music search on YouTube VIDEO (the primary way people access music!!) ??
YouTube Music for Artists (Music.YouTube.Com)
So the big question here is — when do independent artists get access to their own YouTube Music artist profile page ?? … so that they can add bio information, hero artist images, and potentially in the future more stuff like Spotify has: tour dates, artist’s pick aka artist spotlight, featured artist playlists, and appropriate related music videos — are these features on the roadmap ??
Overall, we need to be able to customize our Artist Page on YouTube Music.
Apple Music
First let’s start with the Artist Profile customization questions:
When will artists be able to add bios and tour dates their Apple Music profiles ??
Most importantly “Artist Playlists” — how can independent artists create them and add them to their profile — is this on the Apple Music roadmap??
How do you plan to handle “featured artist” content display on an artist profile on Apple Music ??
Regarding marketing — Spotify added a “submit your music to Spotify Editorial playlists” program. Are you considering anything similar given how powerful the editorial voices of Apple Music and Beats Radio are ??
Spotify
When will Spotify let independent artists make “official artist playlists” ??
Currently artists make “user playlists” and then post them to their Spotify “artist profile” This method is a weird work around, but hey, considering Amazon Prime and Apple still lack playlists created by independent artists, we will take how Spotify has the artist playlist situation set up — it’s better than nothing.
Will Spotify do anything to explain the “follow” feature better to listeners and market why the “follow” button is a great feature on Spotify??
The “Spotify pre-release submit your music to our editorial playlists” program is great — but it would be nice if you sent an email to an independent artist saying a track has NOT been selected after review. Have you considered this?? Especially since the artists fill in a lot of descriptive metadata about their music to Spotify in order to participate in this marketing program. We independent artists are feeding metadata to the Spotify platform which helps improve your machines, so something back in return if we don’t get placed on an editorial playlist would be considerate — just a brief “no” email.
Will Spotify show specific release dates on the desktop app ever?? Because today you can see specific release date on Spotify mobile app but not desktop ??
