Spotify takedowns (and how they don't happen)

Back in October, my band Waxlimbs released a new single on Bandcamp and streaming services, with the exception being Spotify. Once we had put out a notice that we were going to be taking all of our work off Spotify, I sent an email to our distributor asking for all of Waxlimbs's work to be removed from the service. I was told this could take about 30 days, so we waited.

It's the end of the year, and our music is still up on Spotify. I've been told by my contact at our distro that Spotify's internal comms have cited the "volume of takedown requests" as the cause for their "backlog". Our takedown has now been requested again, but to me there's an odd coincidence to this (purely as conjecture, so take this with a grain of salt).

I also had Void Femmes and Feyla (my old electronic project) taken down from Spotify not long before the Waxlimbs request went through, and those projects were removed within a couple of weeks. The only real difference between my solo work and Waxlimbs, as far as Spotify would be concerned, is that Waxlimbs gathers significantly more streams. I would not be surprised if internally, Spotify has a tiered system for which takedown requests to action first, with accounts that make them more money being placed later in the queue.

Like I said, this is conjecture. I am very angry though, and want to make it clear that at this point it feels even more like the company is stealing from artists than it ever has. "Want your shit taken down? Sure thing, just hang on while we deal with our months-long backlog and continue to skim payments from you."^[1]

It's extremely embarrassing for us to say we're removing our work from an ai-drone-warfare-aligned company's platform, and for it to stay online for this long after sending our takedown request.

That's all I've got for now. It should go without saying but at this point, you need to cancel your Spotify account if you haven't already. There are other better options^[2] for streaming, and I guarantee you that most of the artists you listen to are distributing to all or most services.