they're providing zero evidence for this, just unilaterally taking tracks (and entire albums associated with them) down. and notably are doing it to artist just big enough that it's a few bucks, but not so big that their post will go viral and end up in the news cycle, or enough that they would have any feasible legal recourse.
but imagine doing this to hundreds of thousands of artists, that's a lot of "a few bucks" they don't have to pay out. hmm! 🤔
i am absolutely convinced this is a systematic thing on their end and that it's deliberate. spotify is literally the sheriff from nottingham out here.
these are just the ones i happen to see on my timeline. i'm furious.
(ps. @mwgewehr & @floopy r on here, show them some love if you can, buy their stuff on bandcamp etc, and this is singto conley's bandcamp)
i truly wonder how many people this is affecting and whether a class action lawsuit is feasible. so mad
Also on Distrokid but it doesn't sound like alternative distributors around the same price point are much better. A while ago, the Later Alligator soundtrack was removed entirely from Spotify because they detected that the "Incidentals" track (less than 1 minute of random musical bits from the game) picked up artificial streams. I guess what had probably happened is it got added to a bot playlist against my will and caught in the crossfire. I had to resubmit the soundtrack and it presumably lost all plays, stats, playlist additions, etc. it had accrued in almost 5 years of being published.
What's extra fun is this is the kind of thing that could mess with a client relationship. The devs and I are tight in this case, but what if we were relative strangers and your composer suddenly appears to yank the soundtrack off a major streaming service?
In a separate but similar case of automatic systems failing miserably, my recent album got held for distribution by Distrokid because some scanner had detected I used stems or samples from a Tierra Whack interlude. Predictably the song sounds absolutely nothing like mine, not even a common drum sample or something usual like that. I luckily got this taken care of with customer service pretty fast, but it was frightening that the system got it so randomly WRONG.
I've submitted my music to Stem (https://stem.is/) in an attempt to join a more exclusive and personal (but also more expensive) streaming distributor and feel like I have a little more control over this happening. I'm asking for a human to look at what's happening with my music and say "ah, obviously this is not a real issue". You wouldn't think that was much to ask for.
My theory is that Distrokid is too in bed with Spotify to offer any real pushback to their dumb policies, and all of these distributors will not hesitate to throw you under the bus to not risk fines or browbeating from the biggest streaming player. And NGL, the quick decline of these services has had me and some other musicians asking "how hard is it to independently distribute, really?". But research on that is hard because you just get results for these middleman companies.
