I recently wrote a post celebrating a sudden burst of 1,000+ plays on the song “Next”, and then a followup post revealing that the plays were, apparently, artificial.

Essentially, there was a spike a few weeks ago on one of my songs.

Spotify believes the streaming activity on the song in question was “artificial”, which is probably true, but through no fault of my own - Spotify seems to believe that I used some kind of third party promotional service to increase play counts.

Even though the activity was limited to only one song, Spotify reacted by shutting down the entire album it was on, not just the one song itself.

I’ve never used any promotional service. I don’t care enough about making money off my music - I didn’t really put a significant amount of effort into making it perfect. It was more of a fun hobby.

Ultimately, I just put up my music so I can sometimes share it with people that might like it. Having music on Spotify (and other platforms) is convenient. I have always lost a tiny amount of money each year just to have the music available on these platforms.

Restoring the album that got taken down

In order to restore the album on Spotify, it has to be re-uploaded as a brand new release.

The process for uploading an album is time-consuming, and making mistakes can be even more time-consuming to fix, partly due to the permanence of the fingerprinting system that distributors and streaming platforms use. Fixing metadata for a previously fingerprinted song can take days.

I am not interested in doing all this work. My assumption is that it was probably easy for whoever did this to do it again, so it seems like it’s only a matter of time before another one of my tracks/albums gets taken down.

Next steps

Simply put, I will not be spending any more money (and time) to deal with all this. My music will likely be disappearing from all platforms soon, if it hasn’t happened already.

I am considering giving my music away for free with a relatively permissive or flexible license. Or perhaps a different platform. I’m not sure yet.

The biggest loss here is for my Space Codes series. I think that it managed to find a small but genuine audience. I have a few ideas for keeping it around, but for now its fate is the same as all my other music and I’ll be thinking about what to do.

Reach out if this impacts you

If my music being unavailable on all the various streaming platforms has impacted you, please reach out to me at the contact page and I’ll try and make it right for you.