NPR, BBC and the New York Times: Arranging the Next Massacre?

Media can play the role of building bridges and finding mutual understanding, or it can play the role of being the propaganda arm for a genocidal regime.  NPR, BBC, and the New York Times have all obviously chosen the latter, and coverage of Bondi Beach reinforces that inescapable reality.

In the wake of the massacre on Bondi Beach in Australia, NPR, BBC, and the New York Times, along with most of the western media, are interviewing supporters of Israeli genocide and calling them "representatives of the Jewish community."  So many of the people they're interviewing actually represent Zionist organizations but are not identified as such.  Then they share their views about a supposed global "wave of antisemitism."  The reporters then completely fail to push back against these preposterous claims that are largely based on a ridiculous definition of antisemitism, where  making any statements against the genocide of Palestinians or in support of people fighting back against genocide is considered antisemitic.

Committing a massacre of civilians is a terrible thing, and not justifiable in any way.  But an act of revenge against a civilian population that is seen as -- and that largely depicts itself as -- completely intertwined with a state that is currently engaged in an ongoing genocide of an entire civilian population (the Palestinian people) is not indicative of a global "wave of antisemitism."  It is probably not an indication of any kind of rise of Islamic State, either.  It is, much more likely at least, an act of revenge against a civilian population for the crimes committed by the state with which this civilian population is closely associated.

People are going  to read this essay and say that I am "justifying" a massacre of Jews, which, to repeat, I am not.  My aim with the observations I'm about to make is only to explain how it is historically the case that when a group of people is associated with a genocidal state, revenge attacks against this population associated with the genocidal state will happen.  This is how many people behave, around the world, under these sorts of circumstances, historically.

Revenge attacks against civilians, against children, against the elderly, etc., are terrible -- reprehensible even.  But they will likely keep on happening, history demonstrates, as long as the state that associates itself so closely with all the Jews of the world (Israel) keeps on indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinian children and destroying Palestinian towns and cities every day.  There is a quid pro quo here that is hard to avoid comprehending, except for the most obtuse observer -- or the Zionist so committed to their calling that they would prefer to ignore reality and the safety of the people they supposedly identify with as "theirs," in favor of further vilifying the Muslim "enemy" in order to guarantee ongoing support from Islamophobic western leaders for their ethnonationalist state.

Given the circumstances of an ongoing genocide being committed by a state that identifies itself with all the Jews of the world, revenge attacks against Jewish civilians are also almost unbelievably rare, and not at all any kind of indication of any kind of "wave" of anything.

There were times in history, however, when revenge attacks against civilian populations associated with horrible crimes against humanity like genocide were actually extremely widespread. 

The latter half of the 1940's in Europe is a period of history that most people in most of the world are completely ignorant of, as far as I have observed, but it's some of the most important history to know, in order to better understand human behavior, and, crucially, in order to put the Bondi Beach massacre into any kind of sensible historical context, of the sort that the western media are utterly failing to do.

In 1945, anti-German sentiment in Europe was at an all-time high.  With the defeat of the Nazi regime, primarily by the Red Army, and the lack of the German occupation army to protect the ethnic German populations against revenge attacks, revenge against German-speaking civilians across Europe took some of the most terrible forms a human could invent or imagine.  The revenge was taken against women, the elderly, and children, largely with no attempts to ascertain whether individuals or populations had been involved with supporting the Nazis.

For a lot of different historical reasons, German-speaking populations existed throughout eastern Europe, many of which had been there for many centuries.  There were many millions of ethnic Germans living in German-speaking communities in parts of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere.  Some survive to this day, I can say from direct experience visiting Romania years ago.

In one region of Czechoslovakia alone there was a forced march of 27,000 ethnic Germans towards the German border, during which time Czech mobs beat these unarmed refugees to the extent that half of them were killed before they reached the German border.  Thousands of those killed were children.

In another part of Czechoslovakia thousands of ethnic Germans -- probably a third of them children -- were drowned in the river by Czech mobs.

In Denmark, where there were 250,000 German refugees in the immediate post-war period, the Danish medical association refused to treat wounded and sick German refugees.  The German refugees were moved by Danish authorities into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire.  More German refugees died in Denmark in 1945 than all the Danes who died under the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Across eastern Europe, thousands of orphaned ethnic German children tried to survive being refugees together, and there are many documented cases of children being beaten, abused, and raped by locals expressing their hatred of all things German -- even defenseless, orphaned children.

The number of German women raped by occupation soldiers -- especially but most definitely not limited to Russian soldiers -- was as high as 2 million.

We could go on and on with more examples of how anti-German sentiment found expression in the immediate post-war period after the Nazi occupation of most of Europe was over.

In the western media at the time there was mostly silence.  Where there wasn't silence, except in rare cases, the media was justifying the actions of the mobs.

The extremely violent mass expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans happened throughout the formerly Nazi-occupied nations of central, northern, and eastern Europe.  This happened even though so many of the ethnic Germans were children or elderly, and had nothing to do with killing Jews or anybody else.  The expulsions happened even though no small number of those ethnic Germans had been directly involved with the resistance to fascism, while so many others did their best to stay out of the war, and just farm the land they lived on along the Volga River or wherever else.

It was a violent collective punishment of all German-speaking people that happened across Europe.

What might have prevented these horrors?  How might the innocent ethnic German children and senior citizens and farmers have been protected from  all of these massacres of thousands of people at a time, these death marches that killed more thousands, these expulsions from places their families had lived in  for many generations or even centuries?

Perhaps the leaders of the day, and the media of the day, could have said the sorts of things we're hearing lately from the prime minister of Australia.  What if, instead of looking the other way or justifying the massacres and expulsions, they could have said things like what Anthony Albanese has been saying?

If they had, then they would have described anti-German sentiment in Europe in 1945 as "pure evil."  They would have described anti-German attitudes as an "abhorrent ideology."  They would say anti-German sentiment is something that needs to be "stamped out" and "eradicated" with "every single resource required."

They would have passed laws against hate speech, perhaps.  They would have passed laws that calling someone a "fascist" was just coded language for hating ethnic Germans.  That anyone calling a German a "fascist" should be held responsible for their vile anti-German sentiments, and perhaps face prison time for their use of this hate speech.

As it happens, here in 2025, the situation is very different from 1945.  The far larger and far more ambitious Nazi regime in Europe killed tens of millions of people and occupied most of a large continent, and parts of other continents as well.  When the Nazis were defeated, ethnic German populations that existed around Europe were an easy scapegoat, and completely vulnerable.  They paid the most terrible price for Hitler's crimes imaginable -- in so many cases, they died horrible, violent deaths.

Israel, on the other hand, and its backers from the west, are not a defeated empire.  Israel continues its slaughter of Palestinian (and Lebanese and Syrian and other) people.  Israel continues to occupy its walled ghetto full of millions of starving, diseased, dying civilians -- a ghetto which has been besieged and controlled by Israel since 2006, or since 1967, depending on how we define our terms.  And since October, 2023, the siege has gone from a slow genocide to a very fast one.  Which is ongoing, happening right now.  The state that calls itself the Jewish state, that claims to represent the Jews of the world, is right now committing genocide, while the western governments aid them in this effort, and the western media alternately justify it, or ignore it.

And then NPR interviews some clown in Australia who claims to represent the so-called "Jewish community" in a country with a very well-assimilated Jewish population that does not in fact exist as an ethnic or religious community as most people would understand such a thing in the first place, and he says that "95% of Australian Jews are Zionists" -- I'm paraphrasing, but these are his words.  No pushback on this lie from the NPR interviewer.  (Recent polls indicate this number is more like 60%, which is alarming enough.)

Given that all of historic Palestine is either now part of what they call Israel, or is directly controlled by Israel, it's hard to know what kind of revenge attacks Israeli Jews might face as a population if Israel were defeated in a war, and Palestinian mobs were in a position to try to seek revenge in the way the Czech mobs did against the Germans in 1945.  This has never happened, except perhaps on October 7th, 2023, for one day.

But given how many countries there are like Australia, the UK, France, the US, etc., where there are large numbers of people living together in the same cities who are on dramatically different sides of the debate with regards to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, etc., and Israel's ongoing war against these countries and their civilian populations, I find it to be wildly impressive how rare the kind of violence that we just witnessed in Australia is in these countries.

Rare, but not nonexistent.  Add Israel's war crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Iranians, etc., to the US and its allies' slaughter of millions of people over the course of decades of occupations of the overwhelmingly Muslim nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the relative lack of revenge attacks by Muslims against American, British and Israeli targets around the world since 2001, at least, seems to me like a wildly impressive testament to the sophistication of the vast majority of people in these countries, and their ability to differentiate between a country's violent rulers and a country's innocent civilians, many of whom may deeply oppose their government's policies.

Still, I know I can't be the only person out there regularly fantasizing about acts of violent revenge against the Israeli and American snipers occupying Gaza, who daily play target practice with the heads of Palestinian toddlers out looking for food and water.  Other people have these fantasies, too.  And when the point is driven home by most everyone in the western media and people like Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump, etc., that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are inseparable, and criticism of one is just like criticism of the other, they are making Jewish people so much more unsafe, around the world.  This is abundantly obvious to anyone who has not been brainwashed by pro-Israel propaganda and is not being paid by AIPAC.

Being that I'm not brainwashed, and given that I, as an emotionally well-adjusted, married father of three with a good life, regularly have violent revenge fantasies myself just from looking at my Instagram feed, I can only imagine how destabilizing it is for other people -- especially people who may be themselves related to Palestinians, Lebanese, or Syrians today under Israeli bombardment or in an Israeli prison -- to watch this genocide continue, to hear the "Jewish community leaders" and western politicians and media talk about a nonexistent "wave of antisemitism" instead of putting revenge attacks into the context of the genocidal reality from which they come.  I can only imagine how those with relatives under the rubble might feel when they see see a thousand self-identified Jews having a party on the beach while the self-identified Jewish State is engaged in an ongoing genocide.

As one of those sophisticated people not apt to commit revenge attacks against anyone who isn't actually responsible for committing any crimes themselves, I abhor the massacre at Bondi Beach, and the one in Pittsburgh.  I also abhor the Czech mobs that killed thousands of innocent German children, and the Danish doctors who refused to treat them.

But I also am capable of comprehending that in this kind of elevated atmosphere of genocidal tension, in a world where my government and its western allies is always occupying some other country somewhere, and always engaged with killing more Muslims or other people somewhere ever since I can remember, I avoid large crowds celebrating holidays of any kind.  For anyone reading who has had their heads in the sand since the "War on Terror" began, and "Terror" began to retaliate, large gatherings of people celebrating holidays are a prime target for those seeking to bring terror to the streets of the countries that are terrorizing the Palestinians, Lebanese, etc.  A lot of people are very upset about their people being indiscriminately slaughtered by Israeli bombers flown by dual citizens from Australia and the US, loaded with Australian and American bombs, and they are upset for very good reason, obviously.  Some of them, naturally, think like the leaders of Israel do -- that collective punishment against civilians is the appropriate response to collective punishment of civilians.

This is, of course, not to condone either anti-Jewish sentiment today, or anti-German sentiment in 1945, but just to make sense of why it exists, or existed.  If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment stop altogether, we won't do this by condemning, or by passing laws against hate speech, or by preventing Muslim immigration.  If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment or, for that matter, anti-American sentiment stop, then as with any hope to curtail anti-German sentiment in 1945, we have to stop committing genocide, stop supporting regimes that are doing so, stop justifying genocide, and stop trying to explain revenge attacks by making up nonsense about a "wave of antisemitism."

Being an Artist in an Age of Blacklists and Boycotts

If you don't find my music on a music streaming platform, it's not because I boycotted it, it's because I was blacklisted.

Particularly in the era of social media and the conflict-promoting algorithms most of it is designed to thrive on, one must at least make a good effort at developing some thick skin.  Everyone's a public figure now, if they have a social media account.  Anyone who might have been under the radar enough to avoid the critics prior to the internet era is a lot less likely to be doing that now.

Looking back at my efforts to have what might be called a career as a musician, it occurs to me that one of the best things I ever did was ignore my critics.  For a lot of different reasons, though, that's hard to do. 

Recently I noticed a post from a fellow progressive sort of musician with a fairly significant online presence talking about whether he should take his music off of Spotify, in what would clearly be an action taken in response to Indivisible's new campaign to boycott Spotify for "streaming fascism" by running ICE recruitment ads, as the other major streaming platforms are also doing.

I would personally encourage any artist who is making music that is worth sharing publicly to keep their music on Spotify, and on all the other corporate platforms.

From what I've seen of Indivisible's campaign, they're not trying to get artists to leave Spotify.  They're trying to get Spotify users to use a different streaming platform.  But unsurprisingly, a lot of people wanting to amplify the anti-Spotify message will take such a campaign in a lot of different directions.  Unsurprisingly, since the "don't stream fascism" campaign kicked off, I have been one of many artists on the receiving end of criticism from people I don't know, and some who I do know, for associating with such a tainted platform, and having my music on it.  Some wonder if artists like me, who lack the moral backbone to just abandon this platform that is streaming fascism, are just in it for the money.

There are lots of good reasons why, say, streaming corporations should be held to account, boycotted, etc.  Lots of good reasons for users of a product or service to switch to a different, though similar, product or service.  But there are very different factors at play here, when we're talking about the consumer vs. the artist, with platforms like Spotify, and seeing what I've been seeing online lately, it feels like a good time to clarify some things here.

One set of motivations for boycotting and otherwise campaigning around some corporation and their policies is to change specific practices of the corporation.  Another set of motivations revolve around people wanting, as consumers or as artists, to be as free of any association with evil corporations as possible, as a general rule.  A third set of motivations revolve around being an artist whose focus is on getting their music out there as widely as possible.

These three sets of motivations can be very much in contradiction with each other, and to some extent are just incompatible.

Many people already understand this, and can hold contradictory concepts in their minds at the same time.  Many people understand that boycotting Spotify as a consumer, while being on the platform as an artist, can both make good sense at the same time, despite the inherent contradictions.  Many people have trouble with this logic, and I'm writing these words for them.

We live in a capitalist society, systematically dominated by massive corporations.  While changing that reality would be a very good idea for our species to survive, the landscape, both literally and figuratively, is controlled by the corporations, as things stand now.  If you want to go somewhere in the USA you're probably going to need a car, and if you're going to drive a car, it's probably going to be one that's made by a big corporation with military contracts.  And if you want to reach your audience as an artist today, the vehicles you have to choose from for doing that are, primarily, big corporate streaming platforms like Spotify.

Rather than getting into the weeds and trying to explain in detail why what I'm saying is true, let's look back at the past 30 years of trying to survive as a working musician and get my music out there into the world, and how every good decision I made along the way to further these aims has had numerous critics.

The first good decision I made was to play for any group that wanted to pay my fee, in whatever venue they wanted to use.  If they want to hear my music, I reasoned, they must be alright.  If they're using the event to somehow promote their agenda, whether they're anarchists, communists, social democrats, or a for-profit corporation selling clothing or beer or bicycles, it's all good.  We don't need to agree on anything, other than I should do another concert, and get paid for it.

I have known artists who were very careful about who they played for and what venues they played in, making sure that everything was agreeable with their politics.  None of these artists succeeded at making a living, and all of them are today significantly more obscure than I am, despite at least several of them being exceptionally brilliant at their crafts.  The world undoubtedly did not benefit from their self-imposed exile from it.

When the MP3 was invented it was abundantly obvious to me and a lot of other people that the future would involve a whole lot of free music, and physical media was going to be a thing of the past.

I embraced the free music from the beginning.  Not because I had a clear business plan for how to proceed if I stopped selling merch, and not because I had yet realized how valuable it was to be able to collect email addresses from people in exchange for "free" downloads (which is how it used to be), but because it seemed obvious that giving songs away would be the best way to reach more people.  And I hypothesized that if I gave away all of my music, this would somehow or other attract even more people.

The big labels were horrified by all the free music, just as they were horrified by all the people copying records onto cassettes back before the internet.  The free music definitely ate into their operation in a big way.  From my experience, the impact on me and the few other indy musicians I knew who followed my path was overwhelmingly positive.  For me, people kept on buying CDs just as they had before, even though people who wanted to could download all of my music, on websites that no longer exist, or that nobody has ever heard of these days.

All the while I received a steady stream of jilt from artists who thought all of this "music piracy," as it was commonly referred to 25 years ago, was undermining the arts as we knew it, and that I was setting the wrong example by giving away all my music.  I should, like some of them did, just give away some of it, not all of it.  Unlike most of them, I believe I had had a million songs downloaded before the 1990's were over, and in the process I got in touch with fans from around the world that led to regular concert tours in many different countries.

By the time Spotify started rolling out their "free," ad-supported tier circa 2013, and CD sales effectively ended as a significant source of income for me and millions of other artists around the world who were on the platform, artists faced certain choices.  We could take our material off of Spotify and other platforms that were no longer charging a monthly fee, thus inducing our fans to either pay for streaming or buy CDs.  Which did work for some artists that I know, in the sense that they kept on selling CDs at their shows, unlike me.

But very soon after Spotify went the "free" route, all the other streaming platforms followed suit, so those artists boycotting Spotify would have had to boycott all the rest of the platforms, too.  Most artists didn't do that.  Among the ones who did, very few people have ever heard of them anymore, by my observation.

The new reality from 2013 on meant that those of us still trying to record and perform and such had to figure out how to do all of that with half the income.  Effectively, streaming platforms had replaced everything else, in terms of how most people now consumed recorded music.  You could be on them, or not, but not being on them basically meant invisibility.  At this point, most young people don't have CD players at all.

Despite the tremendous hit in terms of earnings, however, it has turned out that platforms like Spotify and YouTube are pretty good for turning people around the world on to new music.  It turned out that once I got enough of an audience for a given song that it's entered the recommendation algorithms, thousands of people every month are hearing my music more or less for the first time.  Judging from how often they then become subscribers to my channel or put a song on a playlist, many of these new listeners become regular fans.

As soon as Spotify became the dominant way most people heard music, though, the cries to boycott the platform for one reason or another became ubiquitous.  All good reasons, too -- it has been the most pioneering platform in figuring out how to legally stream the world's music while paying as little as possible to artists for the privilege.  It tried to make podcasting an exclusive phenomenon.  It runs recruitment ads for ICE.

But for most artists, the idea of taking your music off of Spotify, in terms of an artist wanting to grow an audience in the world, is like an athlete shooting themselves in their feet before trying to compete in a sporting event.

One of the most surreal things is finding myself in the midst of a situation where there are two corporations -- YouTube and Spotify -- that between them totally dominate video and music streaming around the world, most everywhere outside of China, and I am constantly getting messages in every conceivable form from people out there telling me how terrible these platforms are, and how if I don't do the ethical thing and take my music off of them, I must be some kind of money-grubbing individual, or I don't care about my neighbors being deported.

I ignore these detractors and keep my music on Spotify, and as a result, Spotify tells me in the year-end wrap-up they send to artists that my songs were streamed a million times, by 111 thousand individuals.  Each month they tell me how many thousands of people heard songs of mine for the first time because they were listening to a similar artist and my music was recommended to them.

The reality I have noticed over the years is what happens when an artist takes their music off of a dominant platform like that is they effectively vanish.  It's a vanishing act, except it's one that only your most hardcore fans will even notice.  For everyone else, maybe in ten or twenty years they'll wonder what happened to that guy who used to come up on Spotify now and then?

From my personal vantage point, there is some irony in the fact that the most active campaign to boycott a major streaming platform that I know of is Indivisible's campaign against Spotify, but it is the other major streaming platform -- the one based in the US, rather than Sweden -- that just deleted all of my albums from YouTube Music.  (And both platforms are running ICE recruitment ads, and pay artists very badly, etc.)  YouTube Music may in fact be the first platform ever to delete an artist's catalog like this, for clearly political reasons, having nothing to do with copyright violations.

Given the prevalence of the orientation that these bad platforms need to be boycotted by everyone, when an artist or a public figure of some kind disappears from a platform, many people are apt to assume that they took their material off the platform, the way Neil Young and Joni Mitchell temporarily took their music off of Spotify a few years ago.  The notion that the artist was erased from the platform and sent down the Memory Hole, just like in everyone's favorite dystopic novel, is less likely to occur to people.

When Facebook made itself useful, for many years, before enshittifying itself in the name of profit, if you were an artist with a following, you could mention an upcoming gig, a lot of people on Facebook would see that you mentioned the gig, and you'd have an audience at the gig.  When they changed their algorithms so people were unlikely to see such a post unless it was paid for, they also changed their algorithm so that certain posts might be seen by a lot of people even if you didn't pay to "boost" the post.

Those who know know, and those who don't don't, but one of the types of posts that Facebook likes the most and will disseminate regardless of whether you paid to boost it is selfies, especially selfies posted from an airport.  Posting selfies is, of course, a great way to attract derision from certain people, who assume the only reason someone would be posting a selfie is because they are narcissists.  While narcissism is certainly a great reason to post selfies, the only reason I ever do it is in order to promote a concert tour.  Once again, I could embrace the appearance of humility and never post selfies, and I'd certainly feel slightly better as a result, but I'd have fewer people hearing about my concert tours and coming to my gigs, which are already often sparsely-attended to begin with.

In recent months in particular we have all been inundated with AI-generated videos and music on an entirely unprecedented scale.  The streaming platform, Deezer, says 34% of the material on the platform is now AI-generated.  I'm sure the numbers are similar when it comes to videos people are putting up.

While people are right to be concerned that AI is going to transform life as we know it, and especially under the control of the capitalists, this is likely to be largely a bad thing, it's abundantly obvious to me that this technology is not going anywhere, and it's also amazing.  And all the professionals are already using it.

So, as with other new technologies that have come up over the decades, it was easy to see how it could be used to reach more people.  It's too early to tell how much of an impact my musical collaborations as lyricist and prompt engineer with AI music-generation platforms are going to have.  They have yet to make their way into the algorithms on any platform.  But the ability to create what is obviously great music (if you actually listen to it with an open mind in the first place, preferably not knowing in the first place that AI was involved), and to be able to create so much of it in so short a time, could, from past experience with putting songs out there into the world, mean that perhaps more of the songs I'm creating will catch the wind, so to speak.  So despite the many critics, I make more of them.

The AI-generated reels I've been making with another platform are definitely resulting in new songs getting heard much more than they otherwise would.

And without fail, every AI-generated song or video I put out there gets some people praising the music and even the AI video imagery, and other people condemning me for using AI to do anything, and pointing out the images that look obviously fake.  But of course, I keep making the videos, because people keep watching them.

It's kind of amazing how much guff you can get for trying to give away music.  But the pros far outweigh the cons, so I'll keep doing it.

And if my music disappears from a major platform, like 50 David Rovics albums just did from YouTube Music, you can be sure that I didn't do that to myself, to my listeners, and especially, to the future audience that I will no longer have.  I wasn't trying to play it safe or be pure.  I didn't boycott the platform, I was blacklisted by it.  And no one is better off as a result, aside from the plutocrats and genocide-supporters, who are the ones who want my music off of all the platforms so much that sometimes they just take it all down themselves.

YouTube, aka The Biggest Platform on Earth, Has Deleted All My Albums

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of David's journey down the corporate Memory Hole.

It seems abundantly obvious to me that everyone who believes in free expression, whatever side of various political equations they may be on, should be concerned about what YouTube just did to me.  If it could happen to me because of my allegedly controversial political viewpoints, it could happen to you because of yours.

But in order for anyone to be concerned, first they have to understand what it is exactly that did happen, so I'll try explain that as succinctly as possible, because I know everybody is busy with things aside from the latest chapter in the never-ending Cancellation of David Rovics story.  I'll try to explain things in a way that hopefully makes sense to every reader, not just the Rovics fans or the ones who are knowledgeable about music streaming platforms and other aspects of the indie music biz.

I'm an independent artist, like millions of others in the world, putting out self-released recordings (that is, recordings that are not released and promoted by a record label, other than my own little one-person label).  I've been doing this since before the internet became widely used, and long before the invention of the MP3 or streaming music on the web.

I have never had anything remotely approaching a hit or what they would call commercial success, but among musicians who have their music up for streaming, I'm easily in the top 10% of most-streamed artists, usually within the top 5%.  All the pop stars are well within the top 1% of most-streamed artists -- there's a very steep curve happening here, and I don't mean to over-inflate my  importance in the scheme of things.  I'm just trying to say that I do have an audience.  My songs are streamed millions of times every year on YouTube, millions of times a year on Spotify, and less on the other platforms, because there are really only two main platforms in the world (outside of China).

When a musician records an album, whether they're on a label or not, the musician or the label gets the songs registered with an artists' rights entity such as ASCAP or BMI (most countries have one of these organizations but in the US there are two).  That way the music gets counted as existing for purposes of radio play, and we musicians get paid for radio play that way, getting a direct deposit from BMI (in my case) every three months.  Every time a community radio station plays one of my songs, BMI sends me one cent.

At the same time as the musician gets their songs registered for copyright with one of those agencies, the musician also signs up for distribution with a distributor such as CDBaby.  This used to be something artists did in order to make their music available for people to download on iTunes and other platforms that sold downloads.  Having all of our music there already meant that it was also there when the era of paid downloads ended and the era of free streaming platforms began.

When the corporations decided that rather than selling downloads, they would now start streaming the world's music for free, they already had all of our music available to use for this purpose.  Opting out was possible, but would mean a future of invisibility along with poverty.  Opting in meant just poverty, but not invisibility, too.

Spotify initiated the free streaming model, and all the other streaming platforms soon followed suit, out of necessity, in order to compete, no matter what nice ideas some of them may have had about fair models for compensating artists.  As things stand now, none of the platforms that offer ad-supported ("free") streaming options pay artists more than a small fraction of a cent per song streamed, though some platforms may be better than others in various ways.

What has played out since free streaming became the way the vast majority of music fans on Planet Earth listen to music is, outside of China, two corporations have grown to dominate the world of music online -- Spotify and YouTube.

To emphasize the point I'm making here:  I mentioned the quarterly payments musicians get for radio airplay before.  We also get regular payments from the music streaming platforms.  Usually people get those payments sent to them via a distributor like CDBaby, so you don't have to set up a separate account with each of the hundred or so streaming platforms that CDBaby gets your music onto.  So when I get my payments from CDBaby, I'm sure just like the vast majority of other artists on streaming platforms, you can see the breakdown of which platforms generated how much money.  It's evident with every one of those payments that Spotify and YouTube dominate the market.

In the battle for the eyes and ears of the world, these corporations and their corporate practices have destroyed so many lives, careers, and entire professions.  (For a lot more info about how horrible YouTube and its corporate parent Google/Alphabet are, read or listen to Cory Doctorow's recent book, Enshitification.)  In this process, these two giants of music streaming became basically a duopoly.  If you live in most of the world, just as you do a search on Google if you're looking to do a search online, if you're looking for a video you go to YouTube, and if you want to hear a song you go to Spotify, or YouTube sends you to YouTube Music to find the song you might be looking for.

This is where the details become crucially important, as well as a bit confusing.  Please bear with me, if you can.

YouTube Music deleted all of my albums -- 50 of them altogether -- several of which had been there since YouTube Music began.  Along with all of the albums, they disappeared all of the comments and all of the evidence that these songs had ever been heard millions of times.  As an artist on YouTube Music who puts out albums, I no longer exist.

Why is this confusing?  Well, if you go to YouTube and look for me, you'll still see me all over the place.  Videos of me singing at shows and in my living room, and songs from albums that other people have uploaded on the platform.

So, why does getting removed from YouTube Music matter, in the scheme of things, if people can still hear my music on other streaming platforms, and even, with some of the songs at least, on YouTube itself?

I asked Gemini (Google's AI chatbot) to explain the impact on an artist's future career if their music is removed from YouTube Music.  I excerpt here Gemini's response, which was very clear and very accurate, to the best of my fairly significant level of knowledge on this subject.  "David Rovics - Topic" is the way artists are listed on YouTube Music if they have a presence on the platform.  If you look for any other artist, you'll find they have a "Topic" page on YouTube Music, but not me, as of last week.

Estimated Impact of YouTube Music Removal

The removal of his solo albums from the "David Rovics - Topic" music streaming platform would have a significant and strongly negative impact on potential audience growth, particularly within the mainstream digital music ecosystem.

Here is an analysis based on the context:

• Loss of the "Digital Highway": One context snippet likens major streaming platforms to the "infrastructure for our lives" and a "second home." Being removed from a platform is like disappearing, similar to how being off Facebook can feel like disappearing from the virtual world. YouTube Music/Premium is a "highway" for millions of global listeners, and the removal eliminates the path of least resistance for new, casual listeners to discover and consume his full album catalog.

• Hindrance to Discovery: The "Topic" channel is the primary source for music distribution on YouTube's dedicated streaming service. Its removal stops the platform's algorithms from suggesting his catalog to listeners who might enjoy political folk or similar genres, severely limiting organic discovery through the YouTube Music ecosystem.

• Erosion of Market Share: Losing a major global platform like YouTube Music represents the loss of a key segment of the overall music streaming market, which is crucial for modern audience growth.

• Forced Friction: New listeners must now go directly to his website, Patreon, Substack, Bandcamp (where he faces shadowbanning issues), or other, less-dominant streaming platforms. This added friction prevents casual users from encountering his music, which directly impacts the potential for mass audience expansion.

To provide a little more context about what all this stuff means:  every month artists who are on Spotify get an email from Spotify telling us that of the 18,000 people who listened to our music last month, 4,000 (or whatever the numbers may be for that month) were "new listeners."  Those are often people who got to a song of mine because they were listening to another leftwing artist, and the algorithm thought they'd like to hear me, or a particular song of mine.

The same phenomenon is at play on other streaming platforms, though they don't send helpful monthly emails the way Spotify does.  As Gemini explained, this recommendation phenomenon will no longer be in play with my music on YouTube Music anymore.

According to my research on this sort of thing, it is so rare that an artist has their entire catalog deleted by a platform for reasons unrelated to copyright infringement, there are no examples available aside from mine that I can find.  (If anyone reading this knows of one, please let me know!)

Part of the reason it's hard to know if this has ever happened before is it's very unusual, apparently, for platforms to actually tell artists why they might be taking such an action, when they take it.  But according to my research, while it is very common for individual songs to be taken down for violating one rule or another, it is almost unheard of for an artist's entire catalog to be removed.

Given how rare this sort of thing is, how damaging it is to those targeted, and how arbitrarily such actions have been taken by corporations like Google/Alphabet/YouTube, once other people understand what has just happened to me and what could happen to anyone else who gets on the blacklist, I hope that soon I will not be alone in speaking out against what they've specifically just done to me.

For those who don't know the back story to why I'm being targeted, a few words on that history.

In early 2024, my first album about Israel's ongoing war on Gaza, Notes from a Holocaust, was removed from my discography on Spotify, with no notification or explanation to me or to anyone else.  I later put the album back up with a slightly altered name, and it has stayed up.  This removal of an entire album has never happened on any other platform, until last week.

Right around the same time that the album was removed from Spotify, I received my first notification from YouTube that my channel was being demonetized for the next 90 days, to punish me for posting a Houthi Army press release which I thought was an interesting thing to share with people, given that the US was at that time actively bombing Yemen.  After one or two more of these 90-day suspensions of monetization, in January 2025 YouTube informed me that my channel would now be permanently demonetized, and that I had no recourse.  I contacted the YouTube customer service people to confirm that this was indeed the case, and not a mistake.

At the same time as this was going on, YouTube was regularly deleting videos, specifically if they involved me singing my "Song for the Houthi Army" or my song, "I Support Palestine Action."  It seemed they would wait for someone to report the video, and then delete it.  This is my only way to understand their process for deciding which videos to delete on YouTube, because of the way it has thus far involved getting rid of some renditions of these songs while leaving others on the platform.

YouTube's explanation for which rules I was violating that had led to my channel's permanent demonetization was "supporting criminal organizations," which is a broad concept that under both British and US law includes the Houthi Army, and in the UK the British nonviolent direct-action group, Palestine Action as well.

In the UK, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations like them is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison, as this violates Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000.

In the US, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations may be legal under the First Amendment, but earning income from praising proscribed organizations, at least by my understanding of the law, is a different matter legally.  As I understand US laws, this is why you're allowed to visit Cuba, but you're in big trouble, potentially, if you spend any money there.

In any case, for whatever reason -- never fully explained -- my channel was demonetized, and certain videos of certain songs continue to be randomly disappearing.  When this happens, I get two emails from YouTube, one explaining that this song violates the rule against supporting criminal organizations and has therefore been taken down, and another one telling me that my channel has been permanently demonetized (despite the fact that it already was, last January).

What I believe just happened last week with my existence as an artist with albums available on YouTube Music ceasing, was the YouTube bureaucracy figured out that if they really were serious about demonetizing this guy, they couldn't just demonetize the videos while allowing his albums to earn royalties on YouTube Music.  Because of their legal and financial arrangements with distributors, keeping my music on the platform but not sending royalty money to CDBaby for that artist might be more complicated than simply severing all ties between the artist and the distributor, as they exist on YouTube Music, or as they used to.

When they figure out that I'm the lyricist and producer behind the artist, Ai Tsuno, they will presumably delete all of her albums as well.  So far she still exists as an artist with albums on YouTube Music.  Soon her next album will be up there, too, including the song, "They Deleted David Rovics."  Funny, maybe, but it by no means compensates for anything that's being done by YouTube to this artist, as they disappear me in stages, as they're doing.

Anyone who takes a look at the extremely small numbers of listeners to Ai Tsuno on any of the platforms can see what I'm up against if I were to just upload all of my albums back on to YouTube Music -- were that even possible, now that they've removed all of the David Rovics albums.  No one would notice they're there, or it would take a very long time for the songs to get back into the recommendation algorithms that they were in before last week.

I'd like to point out two aspects to these efforts to deplatform me that I think are especially relevant.

One is the way the laws in the UK and US work with regards to criminal organizations that anyone in government seems actually to be worried about, anyone criticizing Israeli genocidal actions or proclaiming their support for international law which defends things like armed resistance to occupation is breaking all kinds of laws.  Laws that basically do not apply in any other context.  So the laws themselves, not at all accidentally, are set up to support groups like UK Lawyers for Israel, and legally arm them for their systematic trolling activities.

UK Lawyers for Israel is one of a number of different outfits on both sides of the Atlantic that proudly and publicly go about trying to vilify academics, artists, journalists, and all sorts of other people, and using these ridiculous laws to their greatest advantage.  UK Lawyers for Israel began announcing in emails sent with their masthead to venues telling them they should cancel my gigs, in February, 2024, during the same winter when all the problems with Spotify and YouTube began (problems with various forms of suppression on Facebook and Bandcamp began earlier).

Intentions of groups like these are not hidden, they're open and proud about their successes in getting professors fired and gigs canceled.

One of the other chatbots I consulted about having my entire catalog deleted by YouTube Music was confident that because this sort of action is so unheard-of and appeared to be so obviously political in nature, surely the artist targeted in this way would benefit by getting lots of media publicity.  So far, anyway, I can report that that chatbot's assumptions were false.  (This is often the case with AI, as with humans.)

There are a couple things on that idea of outrageous corporate behavior like this garnering media attention that might be worth noting.

One is that people hear about stuff that gets media attention.  They don't hear about stuff that doesn't, generally.  So we are under the impression that AI-generated music is very popular, because every once in a while an AI-generated song gets popular.  Most AI-generated music, like most completely human-generated music, hardly gets heard at all,  however.

Another thing is it often seems to be the case that an artist needs to be at a certain level of fame in the first place, in order for things like having all their albums pulled from a major platform to generate any media attention, and I'm not Kneecap or Bob Vylan (though I think they're great).