What was different about mp3.com's playlists was that individuals - even artists themselves - could create as many playlists as they wanted, incorporating their music with the likes of major artists such as Madonna.
In doing so, artists such as relatively unknown new age instrumental artist Ernesto Cortazar could see an increase in airplay (and purchases of mp3.com DAM CD's )on the website, resulting in potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in royalties from the website.
While individuals have the same power to create playlists on Spotify, they currently don't have the ability to give their playlists premium placements like those created by Spotify that you see when you log-in.
Additionally the writer of the article makes the following claim:
"If it were fifteen years ago, or if he were on a major label, his album would’ve been sunk by that point. He might’ve even been dropped from his label after that year was up, or worse, he’d be locked in a contract that prevented him from releasing any new music."
This is simply untrue.
While Perrin's music was out for a year before it was added to the playlist and started raking in tens of thousands of dollars in streaming royalties, it is, at this point a one-in-a-million success story akin to the fluke success of Primitive Radio Gods, whose indie-released album Rocket received no initial fanfare and unsold copies languished in a storage locker for several years
In one last desperate stab to find a label, Chris O'Connor, the band's only member, fired off copies to any record label address he could track down and wound up catching the attention of Jonathan Daniels at Fiction Records, who then secured publishing and recording deals with Columbia Records and got the song "Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand" placed on the soundtrack for the Jim Carrey movie "The Cable Guy". The song went on to enjoy
Another similar story would be Canadian band Sheriff, who released their lone album for Capitol Records in 1982 to little fanfare, only to have the song "When I'm Withy You" miraculously become a #1 pop hit in 1989 after a Rome, New York DJ began playing the song, leading other stations to follow suit and Capitol Records to begin promoting it even though the band had broken up ages ago.
In both cases, it took a gatekeeper of sorts to discover the song and act as gatekeeper to introduce it to a wider audience. CD Baby's suggestion that this is a case where "anybody can do it" is simply not true and only reaffirms that, even in the Wild West that is today's digital music industry, artists are, for the most part, still very much reliant upon corporate gatekeepers.
Don't get me wrong, CD Baby is a great resource for indie artists where, for a nominal fee, you can upload your music to the site and have them systematically place it on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, and a multitude of other sales and streaming platforms and administer all payments for streaming and digital sales.
Additionally, we congratulate Perrin Lamb and wihs him continued success.