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 they 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.
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 turn of 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. The ones who did, very few people have ever heard of them anymore, by my observation.
This 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 go. 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.
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