After 10+ years of struggling with music distribution & streaming services as an artist I have made the permanent decision to never release my solo, original music on streaming services ever again. 😢

You can enjoy my music here on my Youtube channel, where I have full agency over my profile. As heartbreaking as this is for me, I am so blessed to have found another way to exist in the music industry without being exploited by streaming services & distribution companies. Thank you for listening to my story, and I can't wait to continue to make music here on Youtube! ✨

spotify calling you out for AI streaming is the most hypocritical move ever, considering that they themselves promote AI slop content and botted playlists

This industry is absolutely broken

this video is so important to watch as an artist

Imagine a company being allowed to create bots to artificially inflate their numbers for investors, then removing human artists by accusing them of having fake streams... quite a backwards world we live in.

Karra, I’m a producer and I’ve been saying for a while now that the industry is rigged. You’re a beautiful and talented artist as well as an engineer. Too often, when they see someone who’s independent of their system and they can’t profit from you, they try to tear you down. I’m really glad to see you on YouTube rebuilding your brand. May the Most High continue to open more doors for you.

Wait this was actually like an insanely good breakdown of the music industry, dang, really really appreciate the transparency.

Spotify is engaged in dirty business practices in collusion with distributors like Distrokid. If they accuse you of "artificial streaming," they will threaten your distributor with a fine unless they take down your music. Your distributor, instead of sticking up for you, will just take down your music. When you ask them what happened, their customer support will tell you to talk to Spotify customer support. Spotify customer support will then blame it on your distributor. They send you in circles on purpose, so you have no way to appeal. This is Spotify's way of clearing the platform of pesky indie musicians so they can add their own in-house/AI slop and not have to pay people.

I've heard same stories from artist who lost money both in investing in creating their album and/or tours themselves. It's always important to have a thorough study before hand. There are so many actual and incidental expenses that you need to be aware of .

Spotify has a problem, instead of removing the fake views they remove your songs 🤦🏻

I am a 50 year old metalhead, so I'm not quite sure that your music is something that would appeal to me, but I always try to listen to new things.  That said, I watched this whole episode because I found your story interesting and I know that it is a common story among the majority of music artists.  In that sense, your story resonates with me and I am on your side.  So I subscribed to your channel and I will watch your content.  I hope that helps in some way.  :)

Stream manipulation and fake bots are the real reason Spotify deletes music...  many artists hide it just to look successful

Man… Prince warned us that digital/streaming would rip us off

There are a lot of valid points in this video. Honestly I applaud you for leaving streaming, because you have a large audience and therefore you can actually influence change on these platforms. But there are some nuances I want to clarify since I live in this world:
- Regular YouTube pays out less than Spotify per view / stream for most artists.
- YouTube Music pays more than Spotify, and therefore more than regular YouTube too. You can link your regular channel to it, so it's kind of like it's also part of your channel but now fans can easily stream your music there too.
- If those 1.2 million streams came from Spotify specifically, this would have resulted in about $3,600 - my guess is a lot came from YouTube, which is why they paid so much less per stream. If most did come from Spotify, then it must have been the case that most of them came from India, Philippines or other low paying countries. Or Spotify refused to pay for a chunk of them due to the artificial streaming thing.
- YouTube is cracking down on a very particular type of AI slop video, but they still do allow AI content to be monetized on the platform. In fact MOST AI music on the platform is still monetized.
- You should be able to make your album available just on iTunes, Amazon download etc (download only platforms) where all of the rights will be automatically handled, and the splits still handled by your distributor. This way you don't have to deal with the accounting or rights aspect.

The reason your album got pulled is 100% Spotify's fault. It isn't mass collusion by major labels or anything like that though. It's most likely that one of the many playlist bot scams going around added your song randomly, and since the album wasn't getting much streaming volume it resulted in most of the streams being fraudulent, which tripped Spotify's alarm. I made a video about this exact problem 2+ years ago and it's still happening to artists today. These scammers add artists randomly as a marketing method.

Lastly, I want to bring up a point about the allocation of spend for this album... The production costs are through the roof, and unless I missed it there wasn't a line item for marketing. The album could have easily been made for 1/2 of the price with minimal change to how listeners perceive the album. The videos could have been made for 1/2 the price as well (you did this for a future video). This would have resulted in 50% of the budget being left for marketing, which would have resulted in a much more financially sensical result.

I'm not saying to skimp on production and make a bad product. From an artistic side the cost is justified, but from a business perspective it was a bad move. When making almost anything, the last 5% in quality is not noticeable to most people but it can drastically reduce cost. Everything in life has financial constraints, and working under these would have resulted in a more favorable outcome which may have resulted in better positioning for the next album.

As you said though, it was a great learning experience and you acknowledge the fact there would many things you could have done differently. Plus you got unlucky and got screwed over several times from things completely outside of our control.

Personally I think streaming platforms are going to have to shift a lot over the next 5 years because a lot of artists are at a breaking point with their BS.

I stopped paying for Spotify when it finally dawned on me that I would be paying less money just buying the songs I liked directly from the artists I liked AND I would be actually be supporting the artists instead of my subscription feeding into the pockets of a CEO that doesn't even care about music. Not to mention spotify is horrible for finding new music. Youtube or friends on discord are where I have found all of my favorite bands over the years, spotify is trash on ALL levels. Especially now that they are pushing FAKE ai bands, spotify is a joke, a mess, a stain on the very music it claims to promote and is another major part of the degradation of our culture.

I don't understand why artist haven't come together to file a class action lawsuit against Spotify. Too many artist are experiencing the same and they've been ripping artist off for years.

This happened to me — I had two songs, Had It All and Sabor Prohibido. They were doing good on the R&B charts on Spotify, then out of nowhere they claimed AI streams but i wrot the music & produced it. Spotify removed them both, and DistroKid (mad shady) ignored me when I tried hitting them up. They really treat indie artists like trash.

This is such a crazy, frustrating story. I’ve never heard of you before, so I hope YouTube’s algorithm promoting this exposé results in even more traction as you take your career to the next level. You’ve earned a new follower!

Your first mistake was going through that joke of a distribution company, DistroKid.  Everyone on here who has the same horror story about having their music taken down all have the same thing in common - DistroKid.  The way they handle alleged streaming manipulation by taking albums down is ridiculous and them blaming Spotify for it is a flat out LIE.  DistroKid took your album down, not Spotify.  I've had multiple songs flagged for alleged streaming manipulation, and my distribution company (Symphonic Distribution) just charged me a $10 "adjustment fee."  They literally didn't even say anything to me about it.  Just charged me the fee and kept it pushing.  All the songs that were flagged are still on Spotify.  Just take your music to a different distributor and re-upload it with the same ISRC codes and you should get all your stream numbers back like nothing happened.

😮 I'm glad I found your video. I never heard a cost breakdown like that. Best success! 😊