Deleted From Spotify

"What happened to your Notes from a Holocaust album on Spotify?"

After a wonderful evening playing a concert for an appreciative crowd in Copenhagen, we got back to the housing cooperative we're staying at, and I saw a message on my phone from a friend in Olympia.

"What happened to your Notes from a Holocaust album on Spotify?" 

I looked, and sure enough, it was (and is) gone.  The album was published on Bandcamp, Spotify, and the other music streaming platforms in January, 2024.  It's the first of four albums I've put out in 2024 that is mainly an effort to musically document Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian population in Gaza (as a result of which genocide the International Criminal Court has just put out a warrant for Netanyahu and Galant).

Writing Spotify, I was told by a member of their customer service team that the metadata for the album had changed, and that I should contact the album's distributor to see what happened.  The album is distributed for streaming by a company called CDBaby, and in my section of their website, everything appears to be in order, including Notes from a Holocaust and all of my other albums being listed for global distribution, with no restrictions.

I'm looking into this further and hoping there might be a way to get the album back up.  I was never notified that the album was being taken down, nor was I ever provided with an explanation when I wasn't notified.  Is it now illegal somewhere for the word "holocaust" to be in an album's name?  Did one of the song titles on the album violate the law somewhere?  Was it some of the lyrics?  Who knows, we're told nothing.

This unannounced album removal comes in the wake of what can only be called the active, ongoing suppression of my career on Facebook.  Presumably a practice instituted by Facebook management at some level, with or without instructions from who knows what possible government agency, for many months now my use of the "Invite" function has been basically disabled.  That is, it works about 3% of the time I try to use it.  But otherwise, regardless of what device I'm using, I am being systematically prevented from using this function to invite people to my concerts.

The impact that this is having would be hard to overstate.  I know Facebook is totally passe and nobody talks about it much anymore, but this horrible corporate monstrosity is still the biggest social media platform on the planet, and is still used actively by billions of people.  Around the world, most gig organizers that I work with still rely on Facebook Event pages as a principal element in their publicity efforts.  Before I was blacklisted from inviting people to my gigs on Facebook, this often worked well.  It's one of the only features on Facebook that's truly useful for promoting local events, and now it's no longer either useful or useable by me.  There is no question in my mind that audiences at some gigs have been smaller in recent months as a direct consequence of this suppression of my ability to use Facebook effectively.

Are Spotify and Facebook being told to do these things by someone, or are they blacklisting political artists and suppressing our careers because of some other motivation?

All that is obvious is someone somewhere is actively trying to suppress my work and its reach, both with regards to finding music online and with regards to finding my shows in the real world.  Whatever actor(s) are involved here, whether it's the corporate leaders of Spotify and Facebook, or people with the skills and access to systems to be able to do things like delete albums from my discography and prevent me from using the "Invite" function, the net result is the ongoing suppression of my career.

"It's a sign that you're doing something right," many people will say.  Yes, this is no doubt the case, and that is not the least bit consoling.  The reality is, not a single press outlet on the planet outside of the Arab world has taken any interest in the obvious and ongoing efforts by nefarious forces to suppress my career, so I'm left to blog about it myself -- one more shout into the void.

Posting about Spotify's removal of the album on various platforms, on Facebook the screen shot of the deleted album has gotten virtually no notice.  As usual, the only platform where me posting about anything has gotten seen by more than a tiny handful of people is X.

As I live through the experience of being constantly targeted for cancelation and suppression in so many different forms, far beyond what I've been describing thus far, I feel like I'm living through a more online version of the kind of experience artists had who were targeted to be "neutralized" by Cointelpro in decades past.

Again, there is no consolation in this, no feeling that it's a sign of me accomplishing anything.  I know too much to feel that way.  Cointelpro targeted a massively broad swath of the population -- you didn't need to be very special to be on their lists of targets for dirty tricks, suppression, disinformation, and cancelation.

What is most concerning to me about this kind of targeting, whether it's the targeting I'm experiencing, or that of other people, is what such revelations generate is generally nothing more than a little flurry of discussion among friends and comrades and reposts on X, and then the status quo of an artist being silenced continues.

That is to say, the fantasy I used to have that being targeted for suppression in obvious ways like this would always be a stupid thing for the powers-that-be to do because it would backfire, and get me or another artist lots more attention than we might otherwise have gotten, is just a fantasy.  It's not what's happening -- quite the opposite, in fact.

I have seen other artists get loads of press attention and grow their fanbase significantly as a direct consequence of getting attacked by rightwing media or having gigs canceled by such elements.  But that's not what has ever happened with me, and I suspect the reason for this has to do with what I'm singing about, and what most of them are not singing about -- Palestine.

But who knows, maybe I'm just paranoid.