Spinnup

» see spinnup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Spinnup was for people who make records. I do not make records, and nothing about this one passed through my part of the internet. It gets a grave because of the shape of its ending rather than the size of its audience: a company opened a door to the public, let a hundred thousand people walk through it, and then sent an email explaining that most of them had to leave by July.

It started in Sweden on 15 March 2013, inside Universal Music. The deal was simple enough to explain in one line. You paid a flat annual fee per release, Spinnup pushed it to Spotify, Apple Music and the rest of the shops, and you kept every cent of the royalties. That was competitive with TuneCore and DistroKid and it had something they did not: the company on the other end of it owned a third of the recorded music business.

The other half of the product was the scouting. Spinnup ran a network of scouts across its markets who listened to what was coming through the platform and passed names upward. It spread from Sweden into Norway, Denmark, Germany, the UK, France, and reached Japan in June 2020. More than a hundred thousand artists were on it by 2016. By 2019 the company was saying that fifty eight of them had signed to Universal labels.

~ the record ~

~ the funnel ~

Fifty eight signings out of a hundred thousand artists is a rounding error if you read it as a success rate. Read the other way it is the whole point of the thing. The distribution fee paid for a filter that would otherwise have cost a label a scouting department, and every uploader was doing the demo-submission work themselves, at their own expense, in public, with streaming numbers attached.

That is a good deal for the label right up until the arithmetic changes. Open distribution filled the streaming shops with tens of millions of tracks that nobody at any label wanted, and the majors began arguing loudly about the flood at exactly the moment they were running the taps.

~ the uninvitation ~

The email went out on 18 May 2022. Spinnup was becoming a fully curated invite-only artist discovery and distribution platform, and in the company's own words it could not accommodate all current Spinnup users. Anyone not invited had until 19 July to take down their releases and transfer to another distributor. After that date, the releases would come down anyway.

Musicians who had built years of streaming history on a catalog page found themselves doing a migration on a two-month clock, with playlist placements and stream counts at risk in the move. The invitation criteria were about as clear as they sound: you were in if the Spinnup team or somebody else at Universal had already been in touch with you.

~ what it says about the majors ~

The curated version lasted five months. On 4 October 2022 Universal told the remaining artists the service was closing for good, and it shut on 1 December 2022. Warner did the same thing to Level Music around then. Sony had already gone the other way and bought AWAL, which was curated from the start.

Read together, the three moves are one decision arriving at three companies. The majors spent the late 2010s treating open self-distribution as a cheap way to watch the bottom of the market, and then decided the bottom of the market was not worth watching at that volume. The people who paid the annual fee were the experiment, and the experiment ended on schedule.

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