Introduction: How I Published My Original Music on Spotify for FREE

By Patrik Siljestam
About: I am an artist both in the kitchen and on the music stage! Good food is something I love and also good music :) Feel free to check out my music blog at http://www.soundfromtheheart.com/

In order to accomplish this, for me it was a matter of thinking big, of having the courage and visionary mindset, in order to get there.
If you don't have the patience to read the whole story, just click here!

First, I had a recording of an original song that I was satisfied with. This is a fundamental step, because you can only publish original music that you wrote yourself on Spotify since you earn money from it.

The song I wrote is called "Praise the Good" and I recorded it with a friend using a Blue Yeti Microphone.

You can read the full story on Patrik Siljestam's website!

Step 1: Treasure Hunt on Spotify.com

I went to Spotify's website and looked up what it would take to get my music there. After looking around some, I found in small grey print at the bottom of the site a link named "Labels and Artists" where I continued to click on "Are you an unsigned artist that want your music on Spotify?", which lead me to the next link, "artist aggregators we work with".

Quite the treasure hunt so far, but not nearly over yet. Now I was faced with 13 different websites I could contact as an unsigned artist to get my music on Spotify. 

Step 2: Finding a Distributor

I went through the whole list and did some research. Most of them charged around $10 per song you wanted to get up there, but the last one on the list, RouteNote could do everything for free, leaving you 85% of the profits (after Spotify takes a cut) and giving you the option to at any time upgrade a song to 100% profit for around $10. This definitely seemed like the best deal to me and I had nothing to lose.

The site, RouteNote.com, also has an online store and gets my music on iTunes, Amazon and a couple of other places in addition to Spotify.

Step 3: Correct Format for My Digital Music

Even though I had come this far, I wasn't preparing to celebrate just yet. It's easy to find opportunities that seem really good, but there is always the possibility of further complications on the way.

I started my account and started to upload a song, only to discover that it needed to be in a certain format (mp3, 44.1 kHz, minimum 192 kbps). My music wasn't in this exact format, and so I found a free software online that allowed me to convert my files into the required format, LameXP.

Step 4:

After uploading, it took some time until the music went live on Spotify, but after a few weeks it was there. The path wasn't exactly simple, but it wasn't hard either. Success depended on how great I was willing to think.

Just that innocent curiosity, asking "What if I could have my music on Spotify?" and not having any expectations, was all it took. Sometimes when we grow up we learn about the restrictions of the world and we lose that inherent innocent knowing that anything we desire is possible to achieve.

I continue to blog about songwriting, music theory and the publishing process on www.soundfromtheheart.com!