If any of you have jumped onto your favourite streaming service over the last week or so, hell bent on streaming Superhero, then you'll probably have wondered where the track has disappeared to.
Well on 30 October I received a message from my distributor* saying that some suspicious streaming activity had been detected and giving me three days to provide an explanation whilst they investigated.
I replied saying that I had no extra insight and that appeared to be sufficient for their investigation as the next day the track was taken down.
Now I'm going to go ahead and guess that the platform that was affected by the dodgy streams** (almost certainly bot-related) was Spotify as that's where almost all of my listeners are. However my distributor has removed the track from all platforms.
The whole process is draconian and punishes third parties (the creators) but removing the track from other services seems particularly unnecessary.
This is, by the way, not in the least bit unusual. Music communities on social media are full of stories just like this and by now I would suggest that this has probably happened to more artists than not.
But right now, not only has Superhero been taken down, but my account has also been suspended. So The Vessel is unlikely to be released on 13 November. And that brings me to the crux of my bitching today.
And that's the fact that my distributor took less than 24 hours to take my music down but has so far taken 5 days to completely fail to respond to my questions or my support ticket.
Fairly basic questions like:
How long with the track be blocked?
Will my next (in progress release) be blocked? And if so for how long?
When will my account be un-suspended?
And so far...
::: crickets :::
This is vexing. The distributors (for there are a few that engage in this behaviour) are so keen on maintaining the relationship with their partners (Spotify et al.) that they've forgotten who their actual paying customers are.
And this is the unbalanced connection (pun very much intended). They can forget this relationship because, as in so many cases in the creative industries, the power equation is fundamentally imbalanced.
Just as literary agents can ignore their inboxes and never reply to the bulk of their applicants (who would become their source of income) because they control access to the publishers, so too can the distributors ignore their paying customers because they control access to the platforms.
Which leaves us, the creators, with only one option. Remove our content from those distributors and try and find an alternative that better understands the importance of serving their customers.
So expect to find certain tracks unavailable at various points over the next couple of months as I go about trying to find a distributor with a more balanced operation.
I'll provide an updated release date for The Vessel when I have one.
* You can't go direct to companies like Spotify and Tidal to add your music to their platforms, you have go through this wonderful gatekeeping mechanism called a distributor.
** A dodgy actor loads up some of their own tracks (probably AI generated these days) sticks them in a playlist and then randomly adds some other tunes as 'filler' to make it look a bit less suss, then they point a load of bot accounts at the playlist to goose their royalties. I find it hard to believe that this actually makes any money but there seems to be enough people doing it that it must pay back in some form.
