the 4th major in the music industry

To create an Indie-Major with indie values, offering professional actors working with artists a way to leverage collective power for individual success.
Are there any guarantees? Every track will still be pitched and reviewed by the playlist curators of the alliance according to our strict quality criteria. There are no guarantees of being included in any playlists even though you are full member of the alliance.

The membership fee contributes to creating a member-owned community and shared resources, not only the ability to pitch to playlists.

Much like Filtr does for Sony but with a different cost-structure. There are no guarantees of placements and the review criteria are based on community policies and criteria.

Our system is built on transparency. Payments contribute to operational costs and community benefits, not guaranteed playlist placements. You will still need to pitch your songs for approval, but we work with our catalog long-term.

Payola is a short-term,  value-leveraging,  immediate individual promotional gain. We are a long-term, value-creating, collective gain.

Bots are awesome! They update our playlists, review our catalog, and flag potential issues. That said, they have no part neither our playlist following or streaming base — and they never will.  The very principle of “fake streams” goes against our entire ethos, and we expect our members to feel the same way.

It’s always hard to prove something that you don’t do. However, the indie alliance songs catalog consists of over 1200 songs and if we would have done anything sketchy, the songs would have been taken down or fined by Spotify by now. Taking things further, in all our playlists we have over 300 000 unique tracks from both established and newer artists which are still active and live on Spotify. The playlists are also active, and we have also got some of our playlist immune from “takedown claims” by Spotify themselves.

Our platform is a cooperative resource, pooling efforts to create a significant impact for our members, while SubmitHub is a great way of connecting curators and artists looking to send music. In short, SubmitHub knows curators,  while  we are the curator.

With a foundation in our playlist network, we will also expand to music articles, listicles, and other tools and resrouces that will benefit as many of our members, catalog or artists as possible at the same time. It’s a matter of focusing on the things that will give most to the available resources. Maybe you have an idea that you’ve always been wanting to do, but never had the time or skills to do? Some ideas in our pipeline would be compilation albums, newsletters, compilation albums, sync, purchasing public tools in bulk, advanced analytics, merch platforms. See the upcoming roadmap here.

No. But if you have distribution with a major label or partially owned by a major up to 20% of your company, you may join the community.

To fully utilize the benefits of the alliance, we are focusing on working only with actors in the music business who are working with multiple artists.

You will need to apply to become a member of Indie Alliance where you show that you are an indie actor, work with multiple artists and meet our quality and integrity criteria.

First of all we assess the quality of the music and if it meets the criteria of the alliance. We also review and expand on the metadata and make any enhancements if needed, with moods, contexts etc. For playlists a large component is also the relevancy / context factor, a song could be great in an album, but might not fit into the playlist context.

Yes, you as a label or professional actor can’t market Indie Alliance as a direct service for artists to pay for and you can’t use any method on your own that violates the Spotify policies.

Being indie means that you are not affiliated with a major to more than 20% ownership in your organization shares. We are also targeting professional actors who are working with music and artists.

Indie Alliance owns and utilizes a curation engine that we call “Automatron”. Automatron automatically curates over 9000  different playlists on multiple playlist brands based on objective ranking criterias in the context of the playlist. Automatron has different curation methods that matches songs to playlists based on relevancy. The relevancy is then analyzed by an advanced algorithm taking into account  genre, audio features, popularity, release date, quality among other factors which creates the order of the songs.

Valuing transparency, all members can see which songs are included in the network. We have high quality bars to ensure the best playlists in the market which in turn will benefit all members and the listeners.

Our playlists consist of not only member songs but, the best songs spanning over the whole music market to provide the best listening experience for the listeners.

Absolutely! We encourage members to contribute with ideas for resources, tools or promotional efforts. Our developing guidelines are weighted in favor of high  leverage ideas, shared resources and low maintenance costs. On the platform you can submit ideas, vote on already submitted ideas and see the roadmap.

Based on our available resources we offer consulting services when a member has needs that don’t benefit the alliance as a whole. We have a highly skilled team within software development, content marketing, e-commerce and process development. Please reach out through this form. We charge an hourly rate of €120 / h + VAT,  which is discounted based on your membership tier. 10%, 15%, 20% or 25%.