Most independent artists watch two places: Spotify and YouTube. That makes sense, but listeners don't pick a service to suit you. They use whatever came with their phone plan, their shopping subscription or their country, and a fan who can't find your song in their app rarely goes looking for it elsewhere.
Who listens where
Every service has its own audience and habits. A few broad, long-standing patterns are worth knowing.
Deezer
Deezer started in France and is still especially strong there, with a loyal audience in a number of other countries too. It has its own editors and playlists, and its users are often people who chose it early and stayed. If your music has listeners in French-speaking countries, Deezer deserves more attention than its global size suggests.
Tidal
Tidal built its name on high-quality audio and attracts listeners who care about sound. For them a careful master matters: clipping and harsh limiting are much easier to hear on good headphones. Tidal's audience is smaller, but it includes many musicians, producers and serious listeners.
Amazon Music
In many countries Amazon Music comes bundled with Amazon's shopping subscription, so plenty of people use it without ever choosing it on purpose. Many of them listen through smart speakers, by voice. That makes clean metadata important: if your name or song title is spelled oddly, a voice request may simply not find the song.
Regional services can matter even more
In some markets the biggest service is not a global one. In the Arabic-speaking world Anghami has a large audience, in Russia and other CIS countries Yandex Music, VK Music and Zvuk are widely used, and in Türkiye local services sit alongside the global ones. Which platforms your release reaches depends on your distributor, so check the list before you plan promotion in a specific country.
If most of your listeners are in one region, find out which app they actually use. Ask them directly in a story; the answer is often more useful than any chart.
Claiming your profiles beyond Spotify
Most platforms have their own tool for artists. Deezer, Tidal and Amazon Music each let you claim your profile, change the photo and bio, and see part of your listener data. The names of these tools and the way you get access change from time to time, so look for the current "for artists" page of each service.
The pattern is usually the same:
- Wait until your release is live on that platform.
- Find your artist profile and request access.
- Confirm your identity, sometimes through your distributor, sometimes by linking social accounts.
- Add the same photo and short bio you use everywhere else.
It takes an hour once, then a few minutes per release. Jonas Reed, for example, claimed his Deezer and Amazon Music profiles on a quiet Sunday and found that a good share of his listeners in France were on Deezer, something his Spotify data could never have shown him.
Why being everywhere still helps
Even if a smaller platform brings a modest number of streams, there are good reasons to be there:
- Every fan can listen in their own app. Asking someone to switch services for one song rarely works.
- Small numbers add up. Several smaller platforms together can make up a noticeable part of your reports.
- A complete profile stands out. On services where fewer artists keep their profiles up to date, a real photo, a bio and a recent release make you look active.
- Different editors, different chances. Each service has its own playlist team and its own way of picking music.
- Your catalogue looks professional. Bookers, labels and journalists check more than one app.
In the CULT portal you can see the status of each release on every platform it goes to, which is also the simplest way to check where your music is actually live.
Small checks that pay off
Smaller platforms are where mistakes stay unnoticed the longest, simply because you look there less often. Once or twice a year, open each one and check:
- that all your releases sit on one artist profile and none of them landed on a namesake;
- that your name is spelled the same way everywhere, including special letters;
- that featured artists are linked to their own profiles;
- that the photo and bio are current, not left over from three releases ago.
If something is wrong, the fix goes through your distributor, just as on Spotify. The earlier you notice it, the fewer listeners end up on the wrong page.
How much time to spend
Don't split your energy evenly. Put most of your effort where most of your listeners are, and treat the smaller platforms as a routine: claim each profile once, update the photo and bio when your look changes, and check after every release that everything appears correctly. Half an hour per release is usually enough.
Then look at your reports by platform and country every few months. If one of the smaller services keeps growing, it has earned more of your time.