Business News Deals Digital

Spotify partners with BandPage, returns to Shazam apps

By | Published on Thursday 14 August 2014

Spotify

Spotify has announced a new partnership with BandPage. The deal will allow artists utilising BandPage’s platform to sell stuff through the streaming service.

As previously reported, merch sellthrough went live on Spotify for all artists in January, having been initially launched as Led Zeppelin arrived on the platform in December. Artists could add merch store links onto their Spotify profiles via Topspin’s ArtistLink service. Though it seemed likely that this exclusive partnership would be broken after Topspin was bought by rival streaming service Beats Music in March.

BandPage revealed its Spotify partnership in a blog post yesterday, telling artists: “As new music services have exploded on the scene, millions of fans are spending more and more of their time there. These new platforms have rapidly become the most significant and important places to engage and sell to your fans. Today, we take a great step forward in helping you do that by launching our partnership with Spotify, the world’s largest subscription streaming music service. Through this partnership, musicians can now sell directly to their fans when they listen to their music on Spotify”.

Spotify added via its Spotify Artists website: “With the new BandPage integration, we’re taking things further! Now, in addition to traditional merchandise like t-shirts, vinyl and posters, you can offer your fans ‘experiences’. Experiences are things like private online concerts, meet and greets, song collaborations or anything you think your fans will enjoy”.

Amongst the first artists to use BandPage’s direct selling functions are Arianna Grande, who is giving fans who pre-order her new album via her Spotify profile access to an exclusive online performance, and Miranda Lambert, who is offering an “exclusive koozie and t-shirt bundle”. I just had to look up what a koozie is. It seemed a lot more exciting before I knew, FYI.

As with ArtistLink, Spotify will take no commission on anything sold via its software, and BandPage accounts are free for artists to set up. To get started, go to spotify.bandpage.com

In other Spotify news, Shazam has restored Spotify playback to its mobile apps in Germany, Mexico, Brazil and the UK, having swapped it for Deezer back in May. A spokesperson for the streaming service confirmed the news to The Next Web, with Spotify now sitting alongside Deezer and Rdio as the music identification app’s streaming partners.



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