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 saga. 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 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).