What's happening with DistroKid
DistroKid is removing tracks rapidly due to copyright claims from Universal Music Group, sometimes without verifying artist clearance. This has caused original music and properly licensed songs to be taken down, creating uncertainty for many users.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today’s email is less music marketing, and more music industry news, but since so many of you use DistroKid I wanted to keep you informed (and even if you don’t, they’re the largest distributor in the world so it’s good to know).
Over the past couple weeks i’ve been hearing about artist’s music getting taken down from streaming platforms and removed from their DistroKid. In most cases it’s been fairly typical:
The artist had an uncleared sample
The artist didn’t do a cover the right way (skip payments, interpolation etc)
The artist didn’t pay for rights to use the beat in their song
The song had artificial streaming
If anyone is doing these things, they deserve to have their music taken down. That being said, DistroKid should really talk to their customer first. It sounds like in many cases there were artists that did have proper clearance, licensing etc - DistroKid just didn’t bother asking.
Even more recently there started to be cases where people were having original music taken down, with no sample usage at all. There was even a metal band who had their music pulled ahead of release, with the accusation being they stole a sample from some pop song (they didn’t).
With a lot of the problems surfacing around music from Universal Music Group, people started suspecting that the ongoing lawsuit between DistroKid and UMG had something to do with it. The TLDR of that: UMG is suing DistroKid for copyright infringement and deceptive trade practices.
And today, DistroKid confirmed it has been removing tracks in response to UMG claims.
It sounds like they’re getting flooded with takedowns from UMG, and in effort to reduce their liability taking action on that music immediately instead of investigating each claim. Their terms of service state that they can remove a recording from streaming services if they receive any legal claims for it.
Artists affected can submit a DMCA counter-notice, but that they’re obligated to wait 10 business days before reinstating any content or allowing a user to re-upload the material.
I’m not sure how much of this is in their control. For example, YouTube has a pretty similar policy when it comes to ContentID. If a video is flagged as having copyrighted music, they immediately side with the rights holder who initiated the claim - at that point your only recourse is taking the claimant to court. In other words - they don’t want to deal with it.
As a long time DistroKid user (since 2017), this sucks. I fortunately haven’t been impacted by this across any of my 3 accounts with them, but the uncertainty makes me consider jumping ship.
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