Spotify Merchbar Partnership Means BandPage Is Out
[UPDATED] Alongside today's announcement that Spotify would be selling merchandise from 35,000 artists thanks to a new partnership with Merchbar, was a mention that offers from BandPage would no longer be offered on the music streamer.
__________________________________________
BandPage "offers," which include t-shirts and merchandise alongside VIP events at concerts and other fan experiences, will no longer available on Spotify after July 20th.
The shift comes alongside a new Spotify partnership with music merchandise aggregator Merchbar that will bring the sale of t-shirts and other merch from 35,000 musicians and bands to the music streamer.
BandPage was acquired by Google owned YouTube in February of this year. And while BandPage has continued to offer its services, Spotify may have felt that it was better not to partner with a provider controlled by a company with building multiple competitors that include Google Play, YouTube and YouTube Red.
UPDATE: Spotify's official announcement: "We’ll continue to support offers from BandPage through July 20th as well to give you enough time to get your merch live on Merchbar." A spokesperson for YouTube has confirmed the announcement.
MORE: Spotify Adds Merch Sales Via Merchbar
Love the way there’s literally nothing about this on the bandpage site, all the old text is still there.
This is a huge loss for small and DIY artists. Yet again all promotional tools are stripped from grass roots artists. We can no longer show our offers, we sell through bigcartel, send everything ourselves and keep 100% of the profit.
Not really viable for us to sell small numbers through a huge distributor, which I’m guessing is US based. Wouldn’t be cost effective or easy for us to ship our merch to them.
why would Spotify not use their developers to offer a direct app for Shopify users? Direct partnerships with the e-commerce platforms seems like it would be a more profitable model and have a larger reach giving all levels of clients the opportunity to sell merch.