Streaming Platform Tools for Artists – An Overview

If you have released music before, you are probably familiar with Spotify for Artists. Spotify offers a great, simple tool for artists to understand where streams are coming from , which playlists your songs have been added to and also gives you the ability to pitch to editorial playlists. But what about the other big streaming platforms out there? Did you know that there are more free tools offered to artists by other streaming platforms with hundreds of millions of listeners?

Take for example JioSaavn- the second largest streaming platform in India who claim to have 104 Million active users. You can pitch your music directly to their editorial playlists! How about  discovering how many Alexa users asked to listen to your track on Amazon Music for Artists through voice recognition? Or how many people Shazamed your songs on Apple Music for Artists?

We covered some of the tools out there from major streaming platforms that can help you get a better picture.

Here are a few tools for artists that are very much worth exploring:

Amazon for Artists

Amazon releases its “Amazon for Artists”, giving artists a pretty standard overview on their stats with a few extras. After requesting to claim your artist profile, you can login through your desktop or download the app. Worth noting- if you have more than one project, it will take a while to claim since you can only send out one profile claim at a time and each artist claim takes a couple days to approve.

 The stats on Amazon for artists are pretty much the same as what Spotify or Apple Music for Artists provide. What’s unique about Amazon for Artists is Alexa stats, which shows you how many people requested your song by voice recognition.These songs can be requested by the name of the song, artist or even by saying part of the lyrics!

Another cool thing about Amazon Music for Artists is that it can show you your superfans. Superfans are highly engaged fans that can’t stop listening to your music. The downside is that you won’t be able to engage with these fans. You will only see their numbers. Another cool thing to definitely take advantage of is the option to submit to editorial playlists is available. It can be a bit tedious though. Amazon encourages artists to submit to editorial playlists through their manager or label.

Alternatively you can send an email here: music-submissions@amazon.com and you will be directed to the correct department.

Anghami

Anghami is the leading streaming service in the Arab world. It’s market is spread across the Middle East and North Africa. Anghami also has its backend tool for artists. You can upload your content directly to Anghami without a distributor involved (just like you would with Youtube). Anghami gives a full backend system for users to upload, distribute directly, promote on the platform , receive stream reports and audience analytics. Nowadays, artists can also create a donation page to direct their fans to and allow them to donate funds.

Deezer Backstage

Deezer has pretty basic features at this point, allowing you to view streams and listeners stats as well as playlist additions.

Another thing you can do with Deezer backstage is edit your profile information, tour dates, and add your social media links.

AMP by Pandora

Pandora has acquired “Next Big Sound” in 2015 and from there launched AMP – a platform that helps artists grow their fan base by delivering insights on fan engagement, market to fans and to get to know them better.

A few interesting features that this tool will allow you to do:

• Connect your social media platforms to view stats.
• Add events manually through annotations in your “Reports” section. This allows you to note any events on specific dates and see how it impacted streams on those dates.
• Save and tailor reports depending on what you would like to see
• Data on how many spins you received, song skip rate, song completion rate, week by week comparison and more in depth insights.

In regards to Pandora’s way of to amplify your tracks and promote them, they are offering a few pretty cool options:

• Adding featured songs- you can decide which of your tracks are “featured”. Setting a song as “featured” allows you to get to a new audience based on the platform’s machine learning capabilities. Featured songs will “tell” pandora to play your song to listeners who are listening to similar songs. This is an 8 week process that can highly increase your numbers and it’s completely free.
• Set engaging audio messages to existing fans- You can record a short description about your track very easily through AMP. This will help give personal context to your listeners and can improve your click through rates.
• Add call to action buttons to help listeners engage with your content

Apple Music For Artists

Apple releases their answer to “Spotify for Artists” with an obvious upside on the user experience aspect as Apple knows to do best.

While information is pretty much the same (streams, locations, editorial playlist additions), what’s unique about Apple Music is that they present how many times your song was “Shazamed”.

Another cool thing about Apple Music for Artists is that they give you insights of milestones that your music has gone through. With Apple Music you cannot submit your music to editorial playlists unfortunately which brings us to one of the major benefits of the next tool.

Spotify For Artists

Spotify has become an ecosystem within itself. Thanks to the masses of users on Spotify and the game changing option to allow these users to generate followers through playlists, musicians are not only dependent solely on the good will of editorial playlists. This truly opens doors for independent musicians to get discovered by individuals who are completely loyal to their personal taste. The reason why we bring this up here, is because it is what makes Spotify stand out from the rest.

You could easily find influential curators (or submit to Spotify curators through tools like IndieFlow) and send your music directly to them. While an addition to an editorial playlist is pretty uncommon, getting added to privately curated playlists can be much more common and you can view exactly how many plays you got from each playlist. This can help in strategizing, building relationships with influential curators and track you how effective your last playlist campaign was.

Another cool feature that Spotify enables is the ability to use “Spotify for Artists” as a team with different roles and access permissions. You can easily share stats with your label, manager, team etc.  

YouTube for Artists

In addition to presenting data such as: demographics, avg. view duration, subscribers etc. With YouTube for Artists you have many more features that could help boost engagement, sell live tickets, customize your channel, and more.

Here are some YouTube best practices which we recommend every artist performs when submitting music to YouTube:

1. Consolidate all of your videos into one channel- You may have uploaded music to YouTube on your own, or through a distributor which could cause your content to be split across various channels and topics. YouTube for artists enables you to consolidate all of your content under one roof which helps gain control over all of your content. Heads up though, this can be enabled under the conditions below, and also be associated as a YouTube Partner directly or indirectly (through a label or manager).
2. Own and operate a YouTube channel that represents one artist or band
3. Have at least 3 official releases on YouTube delivered and distributed by a music distributor or label
4. Connect with fans through live streams, engaging content such as: gifs, polls etc, sell tickets directly to fans, customize your artist page layout, read private messages or view your channel’s subscriber list
5. With Youtube’s analytics you can view real time analytics, audience engagement, content engagement, revenue (if you’re in the Youtube Partner Program) and demographics of your audience. You can get all of this data on Youtube Studio both available on web or mobile app.  
6. Concerts and ticketing are available only in the United States, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. In order to sell concert tickets you need to add your events to any of the following: Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, See Tickets and AXS.

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