Who Actually Owns Your Link in Bio?

On the 31st of July this year, Songlink — the service a lot of smart links were built on — switched off its API. About six weeks' notice. Before that, Songwhip shut down, and the links people had put in their bios stopped resolving. Before that, smartURL was acquired, and when it migrated the analytics were closed permanently. The redirects survived. The history didn't.

Three different services. Same shape every time. The link survives, and the data doesn't.

What a smart link actually is

A page that works out where someone is and sends them to the right store. That's it. It's genuinely useful, and it is also, technically, close to trivial. A redirect and a store lookup.

Which is why there are about forty of them. Why most are free, or near enough. And why they keep getting bought, bundled and switched off. Nobody's business is the link. The link is the thing they hand you, so they can be the one holding something else — usually your fans' email addresses, or your attention, or your subscription.

That's not a conspiracy. It's the economics. But it means the link is the part most likely to change hands, and your fan list is the part you should actually care about.

What's happening right now

In June, Feature.fm — one of the bigger smart link and pre-save companies — announced a partnership with SonoSuite. SonoSuite isn't a name most artists know, and that's the point: it's the white label software a lot of independent distributors run on. If you're with a small distributor, there's a reasonable chance their dashboard is SonoSuite underneath.

So now pre-saves, smart links and fan capture sit inside that distribution software. And a distributor can switch it on for everybody they serve. If yours runs on it, you might get smart links included, for free. Which sounds like good news, and in the short term it genuinely is.

But notice what moved. The link layer went from being a product you chose to infrastructure you're handed. And infrastructure you're handed is infrastructure you don't control.

The question worth asking first

Before you pick anything — including mine. If this disappeared tomorrow, what would I still have?

And I don't mean do my links still work. Links are cheap; you can rebuild links in an afternoon. I mean: do I still have the email addresses? Can I see all of them, right now, on the plan I'm actually on? Can I take them with me?

And here's the new one, the one that didn't exist a year ago. If my distributor is the one giving me the marketing tool, what happens to my fan list the day I change distributor? Because when the marketing lives inside the distribution, leaving one and leaving the other become the same decision. Nobody's being sneaky. That's just what bundling does.

Five checks. They take about ten minutes.

1. Can you see every email address today, on the plan you're on? Not a count. Not the first two hundred. The actual addresses. Some tools collect them and only show you a number.
2. Can you get them out — and what does that cost? Some charge for export. That's a fair business decision. But find out before you've got two thousand of them in there, not after.
3. Who's responsible for that data — you, or the tool? It should say, in plain words, in their terms. If you can't find it in five minutes, that's your answer.
4. If you leave, what happens to links you've already put out? The one on a flyer. The one in your bio. The one in a DM from eight months ago.
5. Can it tell you which post actually brought the fan? Because if it can't, you're guessing at the only question that matters for your next release.

The case for taking the free one

It's free. It's already there. It's one less login and one less thing to think about. And for a lot of artists, one less thing to think about is worth more than control they're never going to use. That's a real argument. If you put out two tracks a year and you're not building a list, take the free one. I mean that.

It stops being the right call the moment the list starts being worth something. Because that's exactly when you'd find out you can't take it with you.

What I do, and what it doesn't

I built droplr because I run a small label and I wanted the answer to those five to be yes. Every email address is visible on the free plan — not a count, the addresses.

And I'll answer check two honestly, because it's mine: the CSV export is on the paid plans. Free shows you everyone and lets you work with them. Downloading the file is paid. You can decide whether that's fair. I'd rather tell you than let you find out.

Because the release, the links and the fans all sit on one record, it can tell you which placement brought which pre-save, and warn you when a link you're about to publish breaks a store exclusive — which is honestly the thing I built it for.

It's one person. That's a downside. It's also why a named human answers you.

And if your answer is the free one inside your distributor — fine. Just make sure you know which question you answered.