Taking a quick moment to note that we’ve had our own troubles with Spotify in the past — remember the whole false accusation regarding us using fraudulent means to amplify our streaming income — and the recent news regarding Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, et al vs. Spotify and Joe Rogan made us take a second look at continuing our use of the streaming service.
Pulling our music from Spotify because of our personal disturbance at their business practices would seem to be an easy decision, and while we’d like to, we’ve learned that it’s actually a lot harder for a small act like us than for a well funded artist like Young. Essentially, once you’re on there any removal decision has to be made by the distribution service you used to get on there in the first place, based on their contract terms with the service.
Young and Mitchell are major artists with clout that can compel their record companies to do this.
We’re, um, not.
There’s a way of doing this that would require us to pull all our music from ALL streaming and download services and then reloading it all under new terms. That’s extremely time consuming and disruptive, and frankly would be cutting off our collective nose to spite our collective face.
At any rate, all online sources together paid us a grand total of $1.73 for all our streams on ALL services in the last three months, so…yeah. Not like they’d notice. We’d be pulling the work for our own principles. Which is fine, but as I said, would have some serious consequences for other channels we use.
We’ll continue to think about this, especially as we prepare for a new recording…
In the meantime, how about you listen and download our work from Bandcamp? Far better margin for us and you can have it in any format you want.
http://theduendeproject.bandcamp.com
We’ll keep you posted.
the band (T, S, C + C)
The Duende Project 