We are adding new independent music all the time from various labels, content aggregators and others, but we have to give a special shout to our friends at Merlin. Merlin licensed over six thousand indie labels to us, including many of the world’s leading indies including Beggars, Domino, Kontor New Media, Koch, Wagram, Epitaph, PIAS, Finetunes, K7! and Warp which means we have some amazing independent music in our service that is proving to be hugely popular with Spotify users.

When we launched we wanted to ensure we had the widest possible choice of great independent music as well as the important major label catalogues. Thanks to Merlin (as well as others such as The Orchard, Bonnier Amigo and many more), we now have millions of amazing indie tracks.

When we were a totally unknown service, the guys at Merlin listened and worked with us to license an incredible amount of quality independent music, which is so important to a new music service. Having been live in the UK for a few months now (four to be precise) we have some stats to show that the significant majority of the top-100 indie tracks played on Spotify in UK were from Merlin members. Overall, 10% of all tracks streamed on Spotify in UK were from Merlin which is pretty cool. The entire independent community represents over 20% of music played in Spotify, which shows that users are very broad in their music taste.

All in all, we are grateful for the support and effort that many independent labels and aggregators have given us over the last few months but an extra thank you goes to Merlin, as Spotify was the first service they ever licensed. Nice one, Merlin!