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Brands & Merch Business News Digital
Spotify loses ArtistLink merch integration
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 18 December 2014
Spotify has announced that artists are no longer able to list their merch on the streaming service through Topspin’s ArtistLink. BandPage is now the only service through which merch sell-through can be done within the Spotify ecosystem.
The move isn’t entirely surprising. Spotify first announced the ability to list items for sale on the streaming platform’s artist pages using ArtistLink last year. But shortly afterwards, rival streaming firm Beats Music bought Topspin and then sold off pretty much every element of the direct-to-fan business except ArtistLink.
Then, of course, Apple bought Beats Music. And in August, Spotify partnered with BandPage, expanding the options for artists wanting to sell products via the streaming service.
Although the BandPage deal possibly suggested that Spotify was preparing to bail on the ArtistLink system now it was owned by a rival, the streaming firm said yesterday that it was ArtistLink which decided to sever ties, possibly because it’s now being developed as an entirely Beats (and/or iTunes) integrated service.
Spotify said: “This means that, as of today, any merchandise which was being distributed to Spotify artist pages via ArtistLink will no longer be displayed to users and artists will not be able to use ArtistLink to add new merchandise to Spotify. So if you had previously used ArtistLink to send merch to Spotify this will no longer work”.
Users of ArtistLink are, as you might expect, being encouraged to switch to BandPage.
