Hello Reader — happy Thursday!

Against a cutthroat competitive landscape and a growing wave of critique from regulators and industry professionals, music streaming platforms are increasingly trying to position their offerings as “artist-friendly.”

Royalty payment reform is currently at the center of the “artist-friendliness” debate — with the likes of Spotify and Deezer proposing changes to their payout models that would direct more royalties towards artists above a certain engagement threshold, and away from fraudulent actors.

But there are many other factors to consider when evaluating how streaming platforms can better support artists:

• Is there parity in data access between major and independent rights holders?
• Can artists of any career stage identify and interact with their top fans?
• How easy is it for artists to build their on-platform profiles in a more integrated way, showcasing merch, tour listings, and other fan benefits alongside new releases?

At Water & Music, we’ve spent the last several months working on a definitive ranking of which music streaming platforms best support artists. We’re thrilled to unveil our full ranking and analysis today, exclusively for Water & Music members.

How we built our rankings

We tracked nearly 90 different product features across eight major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Studio, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer, TIDAL, and Pandora.

We then broke down our analysis into the following three categories (click the links to navigate directly to our category-specific rankings):

• ​Profile customization & listener experience — i.e. the ability for artists to customize their on-platform brand presence with detailed bios, lyrics, images, credits, and more, as well as keep data and branding consistent across platforms and hardware devices (e.g. desktop vs. mobile).
• ​Data analytics — i.e. the ability for artists to leverage on-platform data, including listener demographics, discovery attribution, and engagement metrics, to better understand their audiences and make more strategic career decisions.
• ​Fan marketing & e-commerce — i.e. the ability for artists not only to grow their on-platform fan base through accessible promotional and CRM tools, but also to convert streaming fans into commercial customers across touring, merch, and other adjacent revenue streams.

We also spoke on background with several artist marketing and product reps at major streaming platforms, to learn more about their respective goals, team structures, and future feature roadmaps. (Ultimately, no platform was willing to go on the record with us about their plans.)

A preview of our findings:

• Spotify leads in overall feature breadth, but still has room to improve in areas like transparency. The Spotify For Artists toolkit takes our #1 spot, largely thanks to unmatched profile customization options, a wide range of advertising and marketing features, and rich consumption analytics. However, the platform recently removed several years of older streaming data, limiting artists' visibility into long-term listening trends.
• YouTube and SoundCloud enable the most direct fan connections. YouTube's comment sections and SoundCloud's ability for artists to directly message fans make these platforms stronger for audience engagement, compared to larger competitors like Spotify and Apple Music. However, YouTube Music separates artists' standard YouTube profiles from their music pages, fragmenting data.
• Apple Music and Amazon Music lag in marketing capabilities. While these platforms score relatively high on analytics insights, they offer almost no self-serve advertising or on-platform fan marketing options for artists.
• Data access remains uneven. Major labels enjoy access to far more granular analytics across all major streaming platforms, although third-party analytics services like Chartmetric are helping to level the playing field for independents.
• Commerce and ticket sales integration is still early. Most streaming platforms still have a long way to go in providing turnkey e-commerce tools for artists; Spotify leads here again, through their self-service integrations with platforms like Shopify.

Who is this for?

Our goal in this analysis is to provide an objective, bird’s-eye view of streaming products from the artist’s perspective.

We hope this report promotes cross-industry transparency and guides future strategy and decision-making for:

• Artists and their teams who are looking to maximize their brand presence and high-level return-on-investment (ROI) from streaming, and/or are seeking a more accessible framework for assessing which platforms will be the most effective information sources for their marketing campaigns.
• Product- and artist-facing teams at streaming platforms who are looking to identify clear opportunities to improve their products and competitive positioning in the wider streaming landscape.
• Startup founders and investors who are looking to better understand the challenges artists face with streaming from a data and marketing perspective, to inform new features or initiatives across a wide variety of music-tech products.

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