Hello Friend!

On Thursday our album was taken down from Spotify.

This was abrubt, annoying, etcetera. But it also lead to me asking a lot of questions (ones I’d already been considering) about streaming services and Spotify in particular.

So, over the weekend I asked my bandmates to vote on how we would release our next song. I gave three options: release on everything, release on everything but Spotify, or release just on Bandcamp.

Our decision was to release on every streaming platform apart from Spotify.

What now?

I’m aware that if you use Spotify, you might not listen to our song as a result. Or at least you might listen to it less.

In the dark years when Neil Young and Joni Mitchell took their music off Spotify, I certainly listened to them less as a result. So I know that’s gonna happen with us.

And that’s fine. I believe our music deserves more than the passive/disposable listening habits that Spotify encourages anyway.

So good. Maybe listen to us (even) less. But you can now listen to us only when you really want to.

And if you want some reasons to try get off Spotify, here they are:

Things That Are Bad About Spotify (a list in progress)

1. They took down our album

This is pretty self-explanatory.

2. Bots are allowed to artificially inflate streams

The reason our album was took down was because a bot artificially increased the streams on one of our songs. We didn’t ask for this. Spotify allowed this.

3. AI-slop is proliferating the platform

In our last email I spoke about The Velvet Sundown, an entirely AI-generated band. I found out afterwards that they used bots to harvest thousands upon thousands of streams. And are they still on Spotify? Yes they are.

4. You can see how many streams songs have got

There’s nothing that ruins my listening experience more than seeing that one song on an album has more streams than the others. I can’t turn off the part of my brain which thinks “ah big number, must be better“.

5. It does what file-sharing did, except you pay for it

File sharing and piracy is more ethical than using Spotify. And if you transfer a zip. file of an artists discography to your friend, you might become their friend a little more.

6. Their CEO, Daniel Ek, is funding all sorts of horrible military start ups

My music might make Spotify 50p, but I’d be sad to know that 50p of my money is going towards causing misery in the world. That’s 50p I’ll be saving for someone else.

7. They run ads, even on the paid version

One thing I love about my CD player is that annoying musicians can’t run ads on it.

8. They trick us into marketing for them

Ok ok ok. I have posted my Spotify Wrapped to social media before. But all it is, at the end of the day, is free marketing for Spotify. Let’s all not do it.

There are more reasons. That’s for later.

Distroshit

As well as all this, after posting our last email to Instagram, I had some discussions with other musicians/labels about our Distributor, Distrokid.

Well, apparently they’re not very good. And streams often get flagged as artifical under their watch.

So - we’ve been recommended other distributors. And this is something we will explore. Then maybe with them we could imagine uploading to Spotify, with more protections in place than a faceless distributor like Distrokid would give us.

But - to be clear - I’m still skeptical of doing this.

What’s to be done?

I think this is something we need to work out together.

We’re working it out as a band, but I think it’ll take a conversation with the whole DIY music community to decide what happens next.

But for now speak soon.

Best wishes - Rowan.

---

PS: our next recording - YOU WILL NEVER GET THAT FEELING BACK - will come out on the 18th of July.

Just not on Spotify.