Spotify: Wrapped, Robbed, and Censored

It's #SpotifyWrapped time again, and this year's summary of my presence on the platform is especially Kafka Orwell.

Israel is killing everyone in Gaza, in a genocidal campaign of extermination of all babies, children, and adults in the Gaza Strip.  This is easy to verify in so many ways, since so much of the wanton slaughter is being captured live, on camera, and streamed to the world.  The western media, however, ignores almost all of it, and when they occasionally, randomly mention one of the daily atrocities against children and babies committed by drones and snipers, they always attempt to contextualize it with crazy talk about "Israel's war with Hamas," which is called disinformation by any reasonable observer.

Given this backdrop, nothing should surprise anyone.  Are masked police in England rounding up journalists, Jewish scholars of the Nazi Holocaust, and anyone else who speaks or posts anything that smacks of sympathy for people who are trying to fight back against the genocide they are experiencing?  Yes, they are.  Are they brutalizing said journalists and charging them with crimes punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for saying the wrong things on social media or in a speech at a rally?  Yes, they are.  Is the western media telling you this is happening, ever, at all?  No, they aren't.

If committing genocide in broad daylight against an entire people isn't newsworthy, and brutalizing journalists and scholars who say the wrong thing in that great citadel of democracy known as the United Kingdom is also not a story worth covering, the fact that the world's biggest music streaming platform is erasing entire albums from the internet and pretending they never existed, with no notification or explanation, and then in multiple ways lying about the Kafkaesque/Orwellian practice, is also not deemed worthy of a single mention by any press outlet, should surprise no one.

You are reading the words of a person who could be disappeared at any moment, effectively.  An artist whose work could be erased entirely with no explanation -- here one day, gone the next.  (Please don't tell me about alternative platforms.  If you do, you're entirely missing the point.)

Most people accept it as self-evident that just about all the world's music can be found, for free, on Spotify.  If anyone is left out of that massive pool of free music, there must be a reason, and after all, it's so few of them, overall, that it probably didn't matter, whatever happened there.  Just see what song the algorithm recommends next, it'll probably be a good one.

Yesterday was the day the global press celebrates as #SpotifyWrapped Day -- the day Spotify deigns to reveal a little bit of their massive, secret trove of data on all the world's creators and consumers of music and podcasts.  

The morning began for me as it did for who knows how many other artists around the world -- with messages on various social media platforms from fans sharing the graphics they received from Spotify to download, post on their platforms, and share with whoever, listing the artists they listen to most often, and which specific songs they listened to most in 2024.  It's a heartwarming flurry of messages to receive.  Perfectly understandable how #SpotifyWrapped became a thing, if my own experience of it as an artist is any guide. 

Later in the day, Spotify for Artists announced to us artists on the platform their version of #SpotifyWrapped.  Rather than telling us what albums and songs we listened to most, they tell us which of our songs were listened to most, which of our recent albums were streamed the most, how many listeners added our music to playlists, in which countries we had the most listeners, and all those sorts of fun statistics.

What I can say about Spotify's report to this particular artist is it was verifiably untrue -- somewhere between misinformation and disinformation, depending on your interpretation of these terms.  But certainly one or the other.

Their Wrapped presentation flows like a slideshow, with each slide presenting a different statistic.

95,000 distinct listeners from 149 different countries streamed songs of mine around 932,000 times on Spotify in 2024, they tell me.

In previous #SpotifyWrapped presentations they would also inform us where that placed us in the rankings of Spotify artists overall, but they don't seem to be doing that this year.  Perhaps it was too revealing for artists to discover, as I did, that being in the top 4% of all Spotify artists on the planet doesn't nearly cover the cost of your groceries.

They tell me my most popular song this year, as last year, and most other years since I wrote it, is once again "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You."  They tell me my music is listened to the most in the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia, in that order.

They tell me my most streamed album in 2024 was the second of the four new studio albums I've released since January, Bearing Witness, with over 8,000 albums streamed.

Sounds nice, except that this is a lie, an untruth, a piece of blatantly inaccurate and misleading information.  I know this because Spotify itself told me so.

Although the album, Notes From A Holocaust, which appeared on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms in January, 2024, can still be found on the website of the distribution platform I use (CDBaby), and it can still be seen in the stats available to users that it made more than twice as much money and got more than twice as many streams as Bearing Witness did, #SpotifyWrapped informs me, rather, that Bearing Witness was my most popular new album.

The actual most popular new album, the one that sought to document the first three months of Israel's ongoing Palestinian holocaust, is gone -- erased, disappeared, unmentioned in end-of-the-year statistical wrap-ups, as if it never existed. 

Gone from the public record of the world's biggest music platform is my song about the acronym doctors began writing in indelible ink on the bodies of so many hospitalized children in Gaza -- WCNSF; Wounded Child, No Surviving Family (track #4).

Erased are my predictions that sometime in the future they'll open museums in memory of the genocide the western powers supposedly didn't know was happening, Once the Last Palestinian's Killed (track #6).

Gone is one of my actually most-listened-to songs of 2024, also from Notes From A Holocaust, in which I share the UN's predictions in the fall of 2023 that if this genocide continues then soon the number of Palestinians being killed by bombs and bullets will be vastly outnumbered by those who will be dying from Famine and Disease (track #7).

And presumably most importantly, from the vantage point of Spotify and the politicians and government agencies they answer to, is you will not find the most offensive composition, Song for the Houthi Army (track #15), on the album which has been disappeared into the memory hole.

I say presumably, of course, because Spotify has told me nothing other than obvious nonsense about changing metadata, with regards to the disappearance of the album.  If you contact Spotify, at no point will you be told anything else, either.  They apparently have a policy of total denial, with regards to whatever drives their decision to make an album vanish from the public record, as if it was never there.

But in one little corner of the internet you will find a version of the album on Spotify where your ability to play the tracks is disabled, but you can see the title and cover of the album, and a listing of the tracks on it -- except Song for the Houthi Army, where even the title is gone from the list, with just a blank space for track #15.

Presumably, this track was found to be particularly problematic, and is perhaps the actual reason for the removal of the entire album.

Why this track, amid all the other tracks, all of which the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust denounced last February as evidence of my antisemitism, in emails they sent to venues where I was booked to perform?

Because under Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000, the song is illegal, and could get me up to 14 years in prison for disseminating it online or singing it in public.

For people hearing these words who are dubious or confused, let me explain to you why my singing partner, Kamala Emanuel and I are very likely going to be arrested next time we're in England (which will be in March).  Which is for the same offenses that Sarah Wilkinson keeps getting arrested, or Haim Bresheeth, or Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst, etc.

In the US, people can go to prison for the rest of their lives for spending a dollar that goes through the wrong channels.  You can still hear my song about the Holy Land 5 on Spotify, I believe, if you want more information on that reality.

But we have the First Amendment in the US, so getting arrested for the kinds of speech crimes people routinely get arrested for in England and in Germany these days is less familiar to Americans.

So I want to be extra clear about how Section 12 has been repeatedly applied in England of late.

It is a speech crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison if you say something positive about a proscribed organization (which the Houthi Army, aka Ansar Allah, is, under British law).  So when we sing in the chorus, thank you to the Houthi Army, standing for the conscience of us all, when they say "no business as usual, while the bombs continue to fall," this is probably illegal under British law -- that is, it would appear to be as illegal as other statements made by journalists and social media influencers that have resulted in their being arrested and brutalized.  And this illegality, presumably brought to the attention of Spotify by a group such as UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, is presumably why the song seems to be particularly problematic for Spotify, and why they removed it and the rest of the album it was part of.

Once again, I say "presumably" here because all we can do is presume, given zero information or transparency on the part of Spotify or any of the individuals, "charities," politicians, government agencies, etc., that they may or may not be responding to.

What is especially depressing to note is, if recent precedent is anything to go on, if Kamala and I get arrested in London for singing the wrong songs, this will garner as much attention from the western media as Spotify disappearing albums and then lying about streaming statistics in #SpotifyWrapped -- none at all.