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Please add YouTube Music, Tidal and Bandcamp as streaming services

Not all of us use Spotify, Amazon and Apple for streaming.  YouTube Music is great for allowing the user to 'fill gaps' in their music libraries by uploading tracks, Bandcamp are by far the best financial supporters of musicians, and Tidal are well-regarded for their sound quality.  Please consider adding all three to the list of streaming services that we use.

3 replies

This is a great question and there are a number of answers (most of them are boring).
 
1. One of the challenges of offering these links to streaming services is creating the link between our catalog of albums, artists and songs with the catalogs of streaming services.  We have an ID associated with Rubber Soul, and we need to link that ID to the ID for Rubber Soul in each of the streaming services we offer. Amazon and Spotify offer tools to programmatically link our records to theirs, so that we're displaying the correct link on each of our pages.
 
Still, this is a somewhat manual process requiring us to ping their services millions of times to try to get links for everything.
 
From what we've seen in our initial observations, the services you list don't offer a linking technology that enables us to match our catalog IDs to theirs.
 
 
2. Honestly I am not a fan of how Amazon operates, but they offer us affiliate revenue so if a user clicks through to Amazon from one of our links and makes a purchase, we get a little bit of money.
YouTube Music and BandCamp don't seem to offer any kind of affiliate program.
 
3. The adoption rates for Tidal seem to be very low (around 0.5% of the streaming market), and they still are far behind most of the other streaming services out there.
 
If Deezer (on the list above) has 1.3% of the market share and Tidal and BandCamp are lumped into the "others" category, this indicates that they may only be serving a very small percent of our audience.
 
For the amount of effort it takes us to try to do this linking, we needed to try to cover the services that made the most sense to us, and allows us to give more of our users something they can use.
 
BandCamp is by far the best service for artists, and they do have the ability to embed a player into our site, but the structure of their catalog is so non-standardized it would be tough to link to each of their pages reliably.
 
YouTube Music would likely be our next pursuit (simply because they have an embed widget and a large market share of users) if we could figure out a good way to link the catalogs.
 
Hope this helps explain our thinking.
MB

Great answers, I really appreciate you taking the time to get back to me, and for helping me understand the work required to make these services link to your catalogue - I simply had no idea.  Rather than making all of the links yourselves, would there be a way to enable logged in contributors/members to make the links for you.  We all know how meticulous music collectors are - just look at the way Discogs was built!  It's just a thought, but again, I now realise how difficult a seemingly easy request can actually be.  Again, thanks for getting back to me, and thanks for running a fantastic service!

I like your enthusiasm.

We do have a way for users to contribute a link for Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music on Album pages, and for Spotify and Amazon on Artist pages (Apple Music doesn't offer an artist-level embed widget).

This article has a bit more detail:

https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/streaming-music-and-sound-sample-clips-on-allmusic

Our hope was that in rolling out this "Add a Link" feature, we'd have a lot of community involvement and contributions, but we really haven't seen much at this point.