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The company emphasizes that the new feature is not a kind of paid advertising, but will take royalties from musicians and labels.

Spotify streaming service will allow musicians and labels to promote tracks in the recommendations for listeners, according to the company’s official website. Artists and labels will prioritize their music, and Spotify will take this into account in a personalization algorithm that selects music recommendations.

During the test period, the company will work with a small number of mainstream and indie labels and collect feedback. In the future, the feature will start working globally. Initially, the option will apply only to playback in Radio and Autoplay modes, but later the company plans to add the ability to promote in other sections.

The new service is not a type of paid advertising and does not require an advance budget, according to Spotify. However, musicians, labels and rights holders will have to pay royalties for promotion. At the moment, Spotify does not report the amount of the royalty and says that it can be adjusted depending on the test results.

Users can hear the advertised track if:

• they are already listening to this genre or artist;
• the music was acoustically similar to what they were listening to;
• people with similar musical habits listen to this music.

In case of negative reaction of users of a promo track it is possible to cancel. If the service does not bring financial benefits, performers will be able to disable the promotion feature at any time.