 Before we hop into today's video, I want to let you know that I have partnered up with Beatopia, which is a really cool platform that gives information to artists like yourself. They pretty much aligned with our brand and the things that we like to talk about. We are giving away a Newman TOM102 Condenser microphone, which, and I looked it up, is a $700 microphone, which is crazy. I didn't know artists were paying $700 for microphones. Now, if you want a chance at winning that mic, all you have to do is go and follow Beatopia on Instagram. I will put their link in the description below and make sure you let them know that I sent you. If you want something like, yo, Cory the Saver sent me this way, Jocelyn Sneezer emoji, let them know that I'm the reason you got that. The contest will end April 11th and after that, they will be picking one lucky winner to walk away with this Newman TOM102 $700 microphone. So once again, if you want to win that, check out the link in the description below. All you have to do is follow Beatopia on Instagram and let them know that I sent you and you are good. Other than that, let's go ahead and jump into today's video. What's going on? It's your man, Cory. Welcome to The Digital Dash, where I'll be giving you tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now today, what I want to talk to you about is actually a little bit conspiracy theorish and it's something that I personally talked about on the channel before. I've seen this company making strides towards making this happen and I knew that if I had said something about it before it was announced, I would probably sound crazy. The company in question is Spotify. The product thing that we're going to go over is just how they're trying to monopolize the playlisting industry on their platform by outing indie playlists so that they can pretty much do the exact same thing that they're villainizing these playlists for. Now, before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram. I made sure to put my ad name in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Now, with that being said, let's get right into it. Now, Corey, what are you talking about, man? And the thing that pretty much inspired this video was a recent article on Bloomberg detailing how Spotify is about to offer advertising for music artists within their playlists and give me a second and pull it up. So the article states that the streaming giant is asking record record labels and artists for money to advertise their songs within his app, arguing that they'll reach new fans and increase their popularity. The effort is controversial because it's complicating wider talks over long-term music rights between Spotify and the record companies. The service has already introduced one tool called Marquis and it's pitching a second people with the knowledge of the matter. Said pretty much Spotify is trying to diversify their revenue streams and they started out by testing a handful of artists with those being Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne and Trippie Red by testing this product out. Now, it's biggest push music company says is paid promotion. Getting labels to pay to promote their artists in platform with Marquis. Artists of their labels can pay a minimum of $5,000 to have fans notified when a new release arrives on the service. Caroline Records, the independent distributor, uses to promote rapper Trippie Red. They have also co-boss, AWOL has also used it for six of their artists. Now, you may be thinking, what's the big deal? It's the music industry. Everyone's doing paid promotion, right? Everyone's spending bread here and there to make sure their artists is getting heard. The problem that this pretty much comes from is how vocal Spotify has been against paid promotion in the past, right? If you've ever read through their terms of service, if you have ever kept up with any press releases that they put out over the past year, year and a half, they have been very vocal about getting rid of indie playlist curators on the platform who have been charging money for entry into their playlist. Their whole thought process behind it has been that one, the curators technically don't own the playlist. The playlists are technically Spotify property and you can't make money off of Spotify property. And then the other point in the whole matter has been that Spotify is supposed to be an open market where artists should just be getting placed because people love the music and there should be no monetary value whatsoever. They have even won as far to get rid of certain playlists and curators who they know to be charging money for their playlist. Going as far to label them as spam playlists or bot playlists or fraud playlists, which I've long thought was pretty much just a power move on that end to, like I said, wipe out the any playlist in market and so they can come in and sweep up their whole thing and take control of it. Now, you're not be asking yourself, but Corey, why would they care about this? Why would they care if this playlist curators is making $50 from a placement or this curators taking money? And all of it comes back to the deal that Spotify has with major labels and how they're not really making a huge amount of money, at least profit wise, right? Like they're making money, but the money isn't really significant compared to the amount that they owe investors and then just the revenue loss that they've taken over the past X amount of years that they've been in business. They've even went as far to start pushing podcasts to the forefront of Spotify, which everyone knows you don't get paid royalties for your streams on podcasts. So they know that the more that podcast increase in popularity, the less royalties that have to pay out period because they don't have to pay money on those. And that's where these indie playlist curators coming to the equation. If I create a playlist that let's say grows to 100,000 followers, let's keep it there, right? And I'm placing artists into the playlist who are now getting 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 extra streams because of me. That is now money that Spotify has to pay out that they did not plan for or core for because they had no control of the platform that is distributing those streams or making it happen. And that is where the disconnect comes for Spotify and these indie playlist curators. I personally think that the best way to really solve this entire issue will be for Spotify to strike some type of deal with the indie playlisting network or indie playlists in community, because if you do any research into Spotify, a majority of the playlist on that platform or indie playlist, I think has been reported that about 90% of the playlists that populate Spotify have been created by indie playlist curators, meaning people who don't work for Spotify and have no official affiliation with Spotify. So these indie playlists curators have actually created a very wide, very viable market on Spotify just for them to come in, sweep their legs from often underneath it and then move in to take control of it and pretty much do the same thing. And while we haven't really seen what Markey is or you know, what type of pay promotion that it offers, I'm pretty sure it's going to be either some type of, like I said, in playlist promotion or like the covers they do or something like that. It's going to be something very akin to what they have been saying they don't want the indie playlist network to do. And once again, this goes back to Spotify's whole mantra of there shouldn't be money being passed around for this, every artist should have a fair chance, everyone should be able to get into these playlists. But once again, we're seeing that it's not the case, money talks, bullshit walks, they need the bread to make shit happen on there. And if you don't have it, it looks like it's not going to happen for you. Now you may be asking yourself, Colby, what can I do? Because I also think this is unfair. And the best advice I can give you is continue to build with the indie playlist curators that you trust, the ones that you know are doing good business and actually bringing in clean, legit traffic is going to be a minute before Spotify can completely wipe them out. I don't even think they're going to try to wipe all of them out because like I said, when 90 percent of your platform is pretty much being controlled by people who aren't even affiliated with your platform, it would hurt you in the long run to get rid of every single indie players curated. So while we will start to of course see a bunch of major labor artists transitioning to some of these positions and some of these opportunities that some of you may not be able to get, like I said, you can still put up your best fight by just doing a lot of the playlists and strategies that we've been teaching here and just moving forward in that space. This is pretty much a video that I just wanted to inform you guys about. I thought it was a really interesting story. I'll put the link to the Bloomberg article in the description below so you can check it out. After you've given it a read, let me know what you think about this video. Do you think that this is measurable Spotify? Do you kind of see what they're coming from? Do you think this is really going to change anything as far as indie Spotify promotion? Do you see it being detrimental or helpful for the artist that can get into and actually benefit from the platform? Like I said, I would love to hear what you think in the comments section below or come and hit me up on Instagram and Twitter. Now as always, if you feel like you learn anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Colvery and I'll see y'all next time.