I'm not trying to tell you how to market your music, you do you, but with services like Tune Core, Distro Kid, etc that allow you to submit your music to every single music service in existence with one click, why wouldn't you just put your music everywhere? You may be surprised at just how big of a community there is for your niche genre on Spotify and elsewhere!
Anyways, I agree that the Spotify requirement is artificially limiting, especially if this is targeting up and coming artists. They should probably support all of the biggies (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc) as well as indies like Sound Cloud, Band Camp, etc.
I've pondered on and off about distrokid (or the like), and thankfully one of my peers has done just that. Mind you, he is more established and "successful" (as in, gets more paying gigs, more audience, ...). So I've talked to him about it. During the past half year, he's "earned" 4€ from Spotify (in other words, one song made the cut of 1k listens over a year), and 180€ from Bandcamp.
I see Distrokid as helpful marketing investment for discovery, so I was still inclined to burn some money (one teaching session will likely cover my loss, so whatever), but then he went on how he put a video of a performance of a published song of his (published via Distrokid) on YT - et voila - he's got challenged by Distrokid for it. Uh, yeah. I understand you gotta relinquish rights to let DK do their thing, but that's the sort of headache I wouldn't ever want. Maybe he was doing something wrong, of course, but I'll likely fall into the same trap. More reading required ...
I'll keep in touch with him about it, maybe the discovery on spotify led to the BC throughput, but we'll have to dig deeper. There's a lot of us small artists in different stages of our development (say, performance, entertainment, composition wise), I'd love to exchange experiences on what works and what doesn't for the ailing musician. There's platforms which contains a lot of us, but everybody seems to be struggling and there seems to be a strong sense of competition among many of my peers, so it's hard to get unfiltered (subjective) truths there. And the internet is filled with horror stories as well as "from dishwasher to millionaire" survivorship biased fairy tales. Oooph.
Ha ha, yeah I hear you. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not marketing my music to make money (because I know there won't be any LOL). I do it because I spend hundreds of hours writing, producing, mixing, and mastering my music, and if I spend that much time on it, then damnit I want someone other than me to hear it! :)
If you have any presence on Sound Cloud, then definitely check out Repost Exchange. It's a peer to peer site where fellow artists like and repost each other's work. It's great for discovery.
https://open.spotify.com/search/didgeridoo/playlists
Anyways, I agree that the Spotify requirement is artificially limiting, especially if this is targeting up and coming artists. They should probably support all of the biggies (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc) as well as indies like Sound Cloud, Band Camp, etc.