How to get your music on Spotify: A step-by-step guide for artists

If you want the best chance of getting heard as an independent artist, your music should be on Spotify. With more than 713 million users, it’s by far the most popular audio streaming service in the world.

Unless you’re signed to a label, it’s up to you to learn how to get your music on Spotify. This is where music distributors come in: They deliver artists’ releases to streaming platforms, handle all the technical requirements involved, and ensure that you get the royalties you deserve.

Spotify works with a limited number of approved distributors, with DistroKid being Spotify's top recommendation

In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly how to get your music on Spotify — from preparation to promotion to getting paid — so that you can release your next single or album with confidence:

Preparing your music for Spotify
Uploading your music to Spotify
Promoting your Spotify release
Getting paid for your Spotify streams
Final tips for your Spotify release

Don’t worry, getting on Spotify is simpler than it sounds. Let’s begin with the basics you’ll want locked in before you distribute your release.

Preparing your music for Spotify

First and most importantly, your music should be recorded, mixed, and mastered professionally. That doesn’t mean you need to shell out thousands of dollars to work with a sought-after producer in an expensive recording studio, though. Tons of artists teach themselves production skills online or work with a reliable collaborator.

For instance, if you feel confident in your mixing skills but don’t know the first thing about mastering, you can hire out an affordable, up-and-coming mastering engineer to just handle that part of the process. However you go about it, make sure you’re meeting basic production standards so that listeners take you seriously.

Once you’ve got a professional-sounding final product ready to go, you’ll need to export the audio in the correct format. Spotify strongly prefers the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) format with a sample rate of at least 44.1 kHz, 16-bit minimum, and stereo (2-channel). Trusted music distributors like DistroKid support FLAC uploads to ensure the best quality.

The last step of preparation is to get your album artwork ready. Spotify requires a TIFF, PNG, or JPG format using lossless encoding at the highest resolution available. The cover art should be a 1:1 aspect ratio, between 640 and 10,000 pixels wide and tall. The file should be encoded with an sRGB color space, 24 bits per pixel, with color profiles applied directly.

Uploading your music to Spotify

After your audio and visuals are prepared, it’ll be time to upload your music to Spotify. As an independent musician, you need to go through a distributor in order to get your music on Spotify and receive your streaming royalties. DistroKid is a popular choice among independent artists because it offers unlimited uploads, fast delivery, custom release dates, and takes 0% commission on earnings.

An important aspect of the upload process is to get your music metadata right, because this controls how your releases appear on Spotify. For signed artists, the metadata is handled by the label; for independent artists, it’s provided to the distributor.

Your metadata includes the artist names, artist roles, release dates, country availability, explicit lyric tags, and cover art. Some distributors, like DistroKid, handle metadata embedding automatically. No matter which distributor you choose, make sure you triple-check the information you enter. You wouldn’t want to discover on release day that there’s a typo in your song title or a missing collaborator credit!

Besides the metadata, every release must have a UPC and ISRC associated with it. UPC stands for “Universal Product Code,” and it’s given to all types of commercially sold products — music included. Albums have a UPC assigned to them so they can be identified by streaming services, distributors, and stores. This code also ensures that all the data associated with your release, including your streaming stats, will be preserved if you change distributors.

ISRC stands for “International Standard Recording Code.” It’s similar to a UPC, but this type of code is assigned to each individual recording. For example, a studio version, live version, and remix of the same song would be assigned three different ISRCs so that they can be uniquely identified.

So, to summarize: Every album or collection of songs will have a UPC, and every individual track within that album or collection will have its own ISRC. Most music distributors, including DistroKid, will automatically assign these codes for you during upload, so it’s not usually something you have to actively manage on your own in digital music distribution.

If you plan to release a cover song rather than original music, it’s essential that you get a cover song license. This legally allows you to record and distribute someone else’s song, and ensures that the original songwriters get paid their fair share of royalties. Not every distributor will handle the legal stuff required for cover songs, so make sure you choose wisely. DistroKid has streamlined this process for artists, and licensing can be handled automatically for a small fee during the upload process.

Finally, if you want to upload a music video to Spotify alongside your release to promote fan engagement, you can use a music video distributor like DistroVid to easily accomplish that.

Promoting your Spotify release

Now that you know how to get your music on Spotify, let’s dig into the step that every artist has a love/hate relationship with: actually getting your songs heard.

First things first: If you haven’t done so already, claim your Spotify for Artists profile ASAP. That checkmark next to your artist name not only indicates that you’re legitimate, but also gives you control over your artist page, access to a wealth of tools and fan insights, and the ability to pitch your music directly to Spotify’s editorial team for playlist consideration.

Spotify has several types of playlists — some are curated by humans, some are generated through algorithms, and some are a mix of both. No matter which kind of playlist your tracks end up on, they’re a fantastic opportunity to get in front of niche audiences who are most likely to vibe with your music. Check out this post for a more detailed explanation of each type of Spotify playlist and how to get featured on them. (And a quick word of warning: Don’t attempt to pay for placements or do any illegitimate promotion that goes against Spotify’s terms. It’s not worth the risk.)

DistroKid offers free Spotify for Artists verification with every plan. You’ll also get access to the Spotify URI Looker-Upper tool, even for pre-releases, so that you can start promoting your new music right away. Other perks include the free Spotify Canvas Generator (that short, looping visual you see when you play a song), and a free HyperFollow landing page to easily collect pre-saves and share streaming links across social media.

Getting paid for your Spotify streams

The inner workings of how royalties get determined and paid out to artists are quite complex. You may have seen articles comparing per-stream royalty rates across platforms, but those numbers are not at all relevant when it comes to your personal payout. Artist and songwriter royalties vary greatly depending on how their music is streamed and the agreements they have in place with distributors, labels, publishers, collecting societies, and mechanical agencies.

In simple terms, Spotify distributes the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to the music rightsholders. The percentage of net revenue that you receive is determined by your share of overall streams in a given month (more details on how this is all calculated here). For unsigned artists, the exact amount that ends up in your pocket depends on the agreement you have with your distributor and any other rightsholders involved.

DistroKid, for example, doesn’t take a cut of your royalties; you just pay a flat monthly fee for the features you need, and keep 100% of your earnings. You can view your earnings anytime on the Bank page, and use the Splits feature to automatically share royalties with your collaborators.

Of course, most musicians aren’t able to make a living solely off of streaming income. Direct-to-fan sales, such as merch and digital goods, are one of the best ways to make money from your music.

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to launch an online store. You can sell items like custom T-shirts, tote bags, or mugs using a print-on-demand service — that means no upfront costs, and no stacks of unsold merch in your closet. If you want to get an online merch store up and running quickly, DistroKid Direct and Bandzoogle are both great options that take 0% commission on your earnings.

Final tips for your Spotify release

Getting your music on Spotify can feel overwhelming at first, but a good distributor will walk you through it all step by step, while automating much of the process for you behind the scenes. All you really need to do is follow the checklist of fundamentals: produce high-quality tracks, design eye-catching cover art, check your metadata, and put together a release plan to build buzz. Once you have all that down, take some time to explore the different tools and features that will help you level up your music marketing even more.

With the right preparation and a reliable distributor, you’ll have your music ready for release on Spotify in no time.