The BBC will be offering music from unsigned and emerging artists through third-party services like Spotify and Last.fm. So far the service, baptized “Introducing”, offers 22,000 tracks since February. Introducing was originally launched in 2007 to unify BBC Radio programming supporting new and emerging music. The uploader was launched to manage the process by which most acts now send demos to DJs digitally rather than on CD or cassette. It ensures newly uploaded tracks are made available to local DJs in the first instance and includes features for cataloguing when presenters have both previewed the tracks from the database or played them out on air.
With the new approach it will be opening some of that material to a wider audience as it’s quite difficult for an unsigned artist to get themselves on Spotify so the BBC says. Besides Spotify and Last.fm, the BBC also wants to inject the content into MySpace, Soundcloud and Mixcloud.
