yala
← help

getting started — your first link in 60 seconds.

you don’t need to read this whole page. if you just paste a spotify URL and click the obvious buttons, yala does the right thing. this page is here for when you want to know what just happened.

make an account.

head to yala.la and click get started. email + password works. so does “continue with google.” the only required field is your email; we don’t ask for a credit card and we won’t make you fill in a marketing questionnaire.

a workspace will get made for you.

on first sign-in, yala creates a default workspace and sticks you in as owner. a workspace is just “all the things for one artist or label or client.” you can rename it (or make more later) from the settings tab in the top-center menu.

make your first link.

  1. hit + new link.

    on the workspace home, the big amber button. you can also press c from anywhere in the app — keyboard shortcut.

  2. pick a type.

    yala asks “what are you making?” with eight tiles. for your first link, pick release if your track or album is already out, or pre-release if it’s coming soon. the other six are real types — see the 8 link types for the full menu.

  3. paste a source URL.

    on the next screen there’s a field that says “scan from a URL.” paste a spotify track URL, or apple music, or youtube, or a UPC code if you have one. don’t worry about the https:// — yala adds it for you on blur.

    click scan now. takes ~3 seconds. yala fans out to spotify, apple, deezer, youtube music, bandcamp, soundcloud, plus the long tail (anghami, audiomack, etc.) and comes back with a list of every place that track lives.

  4. confirm what fans will see.

    you see a draggable list of services. you can:

    • reorder by drag handle — the top item is the first thing fans see.
    • edit a URL — click edit, paste a different URL (e.g. your own bandcamp page if yala scanned wrong).
    • remove a service you don’t want fans landing on.
    • add any extra service yala didn’t find — patreon, your store, a youtube playlist, anything.

  5. hit create link.

    yala stamps your slug, themes the landing with your cover art (we extract a 5-color palette automatically), and lands you on the look tab so you can confirm the share card before going public.

  6. publish.

    on the basics tab, hit publish. your short URL goes live. paste it on instagram, in your email signature, on a poster. fans tap; yala routes.

what just happened, technically.

nothing too fancy. for the curious:

  • yala wrote a row to postgres with your link config (slug, destinations, palette, type-specific fields).
  • it pushed a serialized blob to cloudflare workers KV keyed by domain_id:slug. that’s what the redirect engine reads on every fan tap.
  • your cover art got uploaded to supabase storage, palette extraction ran on a worker (random-sample → RGBA quantization → frequency rank → luminance filter), and the result stamped back into your link row. the landing page renders themed.
  • when a fan visits your short URL, the cloudflare worker looks up KV (~5ms), evaluates conditional redirects (none yet, fine), and either issues a 302 or renders the landing page. then it fires an analytics event via QStash → our worker → postgres. that all happens in ~50ms p99.

prefer to do it from a terminal?

every tier ships with a public REST API. once you’ve made an api key (workspace → developer), you can do the whole flow above from a curl:

bash
curl -X POST https://api.yala.la/v1/links \
  -H "authorization: Bearer yla_live_..." \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "release",
    "title": "the b-side",
    "source": {
      "kind": "url",
      "value": "https://open.spotify.com/track/abc"
    },
    "publish": true
  }'

full reference at public API + webhooks.

if something doesn’t work.

the three things that go wrong most often:

  • your URL didn’t scan. paste a track or album URL — not an artist URL or a playlist. yala will offer to convert artist URLs into a follow-me link if you paste one.
  • only spotify came back. your release isn’t on the other platforms yet, or odesli hasn’t indexed it. you can add the other platforms manually — click + add service and paste the URL.
  • the cover art looks weird. the palette extracts from whatever you uploaded; if you uploaded a black square, the landing page is going to be black. upload the actual cover art (jpg / png / webp / gif up to 10MB).

anything else: email hi@yala.la. a real human reads it.

next upthe 8 link typeseach one with its own page format. when to use which, what fans see, what fields to fill in.