How artist-friendly are music streaming platforms? Part 2: Profile customization and listener experience

This is part 2 of our five-part series diving into For Artists features on streaming platforms. You can read part 1, which provides some context on why we’re doing this, by clicking here.

The listener experience features of For Artists (FA) platforms aim to enrich audiences’ engagement with music on DSPs. This category of features enables artists to personalize their profile pages and provide biographies, song credits, and lyrics, allowing listeners to glimpse deeper into their artists’ lives and creative processes.

DSPs differ significantly in the range of listener experience features they provide to their subscribers, and the extent to which artists can control these features through FA platforms. For instance, while music distributors usually offer the ability for artists to submit detailed song credits, the DSPs ultimately determine the level of detail displayed to subscribers. TIDAL stands out for showcasing individual musician contributions to a song, such as drums, bass, guitars, and producers. At the same time, Amazon Music and Deezer offer minimal information, showing only the songwriters behind a track. Apple Music became the first DSP to enable artists to directly submit song lyrics via their FA platform in November 2022 (versus having to submit them through a distributor).

Artists are still limited in terms of what they can present to new listeners or fans beyond just their music. There have been just a handful of industry announcements over the past year that demonstrate the DSPs are focused on further enabling artists to customize the listening experience, including:

• Apple Music enabling direct song lyric submission and other profile customization features (November 2022)
• TIDAL launching “TIDAL Artist Home,” allowing artists to add social profile links on their artist profile (May 2023)
• Spotify expanding into short-form video with Spotify Clips, where select artists can add 30-second videos to their artist profiles and album pages (March 2023)

FA feature developments come rapidly, both positive and negative. For example, tomorrow Spotify could quickly turn on “Showcase” and “Clips” for all artists. Conversely, Apple Music for Artists recently removed a two-year-old beta feature that allowed artists to create and post their own curated playlists.

Our full For Artists product matrix, which allows you to dig into the specific features of each DSP, will be continually updated as these features roll out (or roll back). Keep in mind as music streaming services continue to proliferate, new DSPs may also roll out their own FA platforms, but for the sake of this series we’ve only reviewed the established players.

Following is our breakdown of how each DSP performs with FA “Listener Experience” customization.

• Spotify for Artists: 9
• YouTube Studio: 8.5
• SoundCloud for Artists: 8.0
• TIDAL for Artists: 7.0
• Deezer for Creators: 6.5
• Apple Music for Artists: 5.5
• Amazon Music for Artists: 5
• Pandora AMP: 3

View full, detailed feature breakdowns in our “For Artists” product matrix.

By far, Spotify FA beats all DSPs in the area of allowing artists to customize their platform presence for listeners.

The clearest strengths here are related to bios and artist imagery; no other DSP comes close to allowing Spotify’s level of artist detail. Artists can create rich profiles with up to 125 images in their gallery, which appears in the “about” section. They can also provide detailed bios (~1,500 characters), including on-platform hyperlinks to releases, playlists, band members, collaborators, and related music projects. An artist’s collaborations, featured appearances on other artists’ tracks, and remixes appear under the “Appears On” section of their profile, making it easier for independent artists to display their entire catalog. If there is any weakness with Spotify FA’s “Listener Experience” tools, it may be that there are too many ways to customize an artist profile, which could overwhelm some listeners who want a more casual listening experience without too much artist information.

YouTube Studio is YouTube’s creator dashboard, similar to a FA platform on a traditional music DSP. It is strong in that artists using it can create as many custom music and video sections as they want, add detailed bios and video descriptions, and provide multiple social media and website links on their profiles.

YouTube Studio doesn’t rank as high as Spotify FA because the artist customization of the listener experience only is present on an artist’s profile on YouTube Classic. None of that artist profile detail carries over to YouTube Music, which operates as both a paid and ad-supported music-focused streaming service.

Another drawback of this FA platform is that artists will need to make sure they register for an Official Artist Channel to properly access all the musical artist features of YouTube Studio. To make that happen, artists will need to partner with a music distribution company that has the ability to grant artists access to their Official Artist Channel as part of the music submission flow. If a musical artist already has a standard YouTube creator channel, the distributor should be able to merge their creator channel with the Official Artist Channel so that their presence is singular on YouTube.

From its inception as a creator-focused platform in 2008, SoundCloud has allowed artists to create detailed bios, add profile images, and insert multiple social media and website links on their profiles. SoundCloud’s “Next Pro” subscription, at roughly $12 a month, offers artists even more customization options, such as highlighting up to five pieces of content (full releases, individual tracks, or playlists) at the top of their profiles.

With its creator-focused approach and user-friendly features, SoundCloud remains a top choice for independent artists looking to engage with their audience and showcase their work. That said, artists should be mindful of the reality that the DSP doesn’t even appear in research firm MiDIA’s ranking of music subscription market share, so the audience reach of their music and related artist profile on SoundCloud will not match those of services like Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

TIDAL, a high-fidelity streaming service, offers independent artists a nice set of profile customization options including the ability to add their social profile links, a link to an artist website, and main artist image

Despite the fact that TIDAL lacks subscribers relative to its competitors, artists may still want to drive their listeners to use the service because of the fact that TIDAL excels at the presentation of an artist’s catalog. The platform displays an artist’s collaborations, features, and remixes under the “Appears On” section; If an artist supplies full song credits to their music distributor and the distributor can deliver these to TIDAL, the DSP will also display these down to the track level, which is great for bands who want to see their members’ musical contributions shared with listeners who seek them out.

French based Deezer has a solid pan-European user base and a 1.5% share of the global music subscription market, according to MiDIA. The tools offered on their FA platform, dubbed “Deezer for Creators”, offer a decent set of artist profile customization features including the ability to add an artist bio with unlimited character count, an artist’s Facebook and Twitter social profiles, and artist image. Like Spotify and TIDAL, Deezer will display an artist’s collaborations, remixes, and appearances under a profile section titled “Featured On.”

Notably, on Deezer for Creators artists can keep their listeners up to date with their latest news and releases through text-based “status updates” that can be entered in the FA platform, and by choosing an “artist pick” — any release or song — that they would like to feature on their profile.

Listeners using Apple Music will find that major-label artists have rich, detailed artist profiles, with hero images, full biographies, artist curated playlists, artist interviews, music videos and sometimes even Apple Music radio shows that feature the artist. Unfortunately, Apple Music FA does not offer tools for independent artists to create such detailed profiles — which is why their overall FA offering ranks much lower than Spotify, even though Apple Music is the second largest DSP in terms of subscriber market share.

Apple Music FA recently allowed artists to answer a set of standard interview questions that can be displayed on an artist profile in place of their own biography. Artists can also submit their artist image, but do not have the option to place a main hero image at the top like the major-label artists do. There are no options to add links to social accounts or artists’ websites. While Apple Music FA is terribly lacking in terms of artist profile customization options, it makes up for its deficiencies with a good volume of artist analytics within its FA platform, an area we cover in the next part of this series.

Amazon Music for Artists is two years younger than Apple Music for Artists, and while it does allow for both hero images and artist logos, it lacks artist bios. However, they are reportedly exploring ways for artists to add bios to their profiles.

The platform also lacks the ability for artists to create curated playlists and display them on their Amazon Music for Artists profiles. Like Apple Music, an artist’s collaborations, features, and remixes will not appear on their Amazon Music profile which can severely reduce the availability of the catalog of an independent artist on their profile.

Pandora had one of the first FA platforms, as the music streaming service bought an artist analytics service called Next Big Sound in 2015, later rolling it into a FA offering called Pandora AMP.

Since Pandora was bought by satellite service SiriusXM in 2019, investment into Pandora AMP seems to have slowed to a complete halt, and Next Big Sound’s analytics service has now ceased. The most an artist will be able to do with Pandora AMP with regards to artist profile customization is add an artist image.

Why does the listener’s experience with artists matter on DSPs? Because DSPs are where most consumers today engage with music.

Artists and their teams should make it a priority to claim their artist profile on all available FA platforms. The opportunity to create a consistent artist brand presence across all DSPs by utilizing these FA platforms’ profile customization tools allows artists to meet listeners wherever they stream music with as uniform an experience as possible.

With Apple Music FA, Amazon Music FA, TIDAL FA and Deezer for Creators, artists should not expect to have to spend too much time, maybe not more than an hour, to upload their artist imagery, bio, and social and artist web links if the ability to upload those is present. Spotify FA and YouTube Studio allow for so many more artist profile customization options, so artists should allow for extra time to learn those features and utilize them. Artists may even want to promote their Spotify artist profile over those on other DSPs, given they have so much more control over their visual presence on Spotify.

Even several years after launching their FA platforms, some DSPs are still crawling towards basic features like allowing artists to add bios, artist imagery, and artist social and web links. On some DSPs, like Apple Music, there is also a clear delta between the customizability of major-label artist profiles and the profile presence of independent artists, who lack the ability to even add hero images or full bios. There is no independent artist trade group advocating for a standard set of artist profile customization features on DSPs, but it feels like this should be an initiative to give them parity with major-label artists.