More Aussie indie acts can add their music to Snapchat

More Australian indie acts can add their music to Snapchat – provided they are signed with digital distributor DistroKid and own 100% of their sound recording and publishing rights.

It’s part of a global deal that the two companies struck this week that makes it easy for DistroKid members to get fast-tracked into the Sounds on Snapchat library.

Distrokid said: “We’re excited to be the only distributor that can help independent artists get added. We hope you love it, enjoy.”

The Snapchat deal follows Distrokid’s February 25 deal which allowed its qualifying Australian and global members to join the Twitch Affiliate Program, making income from livestreaming, channel subscriptions, bits and ad revenue.

Snapchat’s global head of music partnerships Ted Suh said of the new deal: “We’re thrilled to partner with DistroKid to integrate their artists into our new music-based creative tools… and see the significant impact it has for music creators and the industry.

“It’s been exciting to see Snapchatters use our camera to discover and engage with new music in their conversations with real friends.”

To demonstrate how effective Snapchat could be to break music artists, Billboard cited emerging New York pop singer-songwriter Wolf whose track ‘Hoops’ she licensed for its Sounds library.

Within a month, the song – which recalls her university days when she’d shoot hoops after uni classes— was used in 3.5 million videos to 148 million views, and went on to get 2.4 million plays on Spotify.

With two-thirds of its users also creating content, Snapchat is no passive platform.

Figures from its parent company Snap have 265 million daily active users and 5 billion photos and video posts created on it every day.

In the past 12 months, Snapchat has been reaching music fans and creators with more licensing deals with music companies.

Australia and New Zealand were the first in the world to test its Sounds feature which allows users to add music by emerging and established artists pre or post-capture to their Snaps.

Spotlight, launched November 2020 for user-generated content which soundtracks users’ public posts, drew 100 million monthly users in the first two months.

The quick take-on was no doubt helped by Snapchat offering US$1 million between the most popular creators on the app per day until 2021.

According to the official spiel from its parent company Snap, it reaches 90% of people in the 13—24 demo and 75% of those aged 13—34 in Australia, US, UK, France and the Netherlands.

An independent study from December 2020 puts Snapchat as the sixth most popular social media platform in Australia with 6.4 million local active daily users.

That’s a rise from 4 million in November 2016 when Snapchat released Australian figures for the first time and showed the Australian demo split as 31% of the 18—24 group, 28% for 25—34 year-olds, 23% for 13—17 and 18% for 35+.