Young suspects the particular track of “Problematic,” though it was not her biggest song, was flagged as suspicious because she had asked her friends, fans, and family - many of who reside in the Phoenix, Arizona area, miles out of her Californian demographic - to stream it overnight.īut if that’s the case, then the abrupt removal exposes a double standard in Spotify’s policy. A petition asking for Spotify to restore the music garnered 7,000 signatures - but Spotify has not made a public move besides writing in its FAQ that “paid third-party promotional services that advertise streams in return for payment violate our terms and conditions, and using them could result in your music being removed from Spotify.” Spotify did not respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment. Some shared extensive screenshots of their efforts to get their songs back on the service. Several artists, including Young, made frustrated tweets about the wrongful deletions, tagging Spotify and using the hashtags #spotifytakedown and #restoreourmusic. “Fans aren’t going to download another app just to listen to a song,” says Young.
And while the income that middle-tier musicians receive from Spotify is paltry, it’s still crucial for fledgling artists to have their music available on the world’s foremost music streaming service. Many of the artists affected were taken by surprise, alerted to the news by fans instead of by Spotify or their business teams - and it was yet another problem to deal with on top of a brutal pandemic year that halted nearly all touring revenue.
There’s no official tally, but music attorney Wallace Collins wrote in a widely circulated blog post that, based on discussions with his clients, it seems as many as 750,000 tracks may’ve been wiped. “Problematic” was one of a plethora of tracks quietly purged from the service on January 1st, 2021.
But Young says she has never paid for third-party streaming boosts. when a paid marketing service, manager, or agency uses bots to artificially boost play numbers and increase an artist’s revenue, which is a practice banned under Spotify’s terms of service. He explained Spotify often performs a sweep of songs they suspect have fake streaming activity - a.k.a.
“ didn’t give me a warning or reach out to me to ask about the issue,” she says. Her distributor DistroKid emailed later that day to confirm the track was removed, with no explanation as to why. Young reached out to the streaming service, but to no avail. But that’s what happened in the late hours of January 2nd when a fan frantically messaged the Los Angeles-based pop singer to ask why her song “Problematic” had vanished from Spotify the day before. Furiously writing emails wasn’t how Callie Young wanted to start her 2021.
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