Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing some questions around to get a better understanding of how Spotify’s anti-fraud practices are affecting musicians right now. What I found is a hard look at the importance of bending your online presence towards something you have more direct control over - and it explores the clear need for every creative to reclaim their self-agency, while building community together, wherever possible.

This is a deeper read. It’s been converted to a Friday edition for a reason. And if you’re joining for the first time, this edition can be seen online without providing an email. The Club List is free to subscribe to weekly, and as a veteran marketing executive and writer both, I welcome your thoughts on everything you’re reading. Thanks for being here.

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Moving Against Powerlessness

(Review my survey on Spotify takedowns here, and you’ll be able to see all the questions as originally asked.)

In June 20th’s edition of The Club List, I spotlighted an Irish artist named Pier who had been hit with a fraud takedown of his song “Hollow” from Spotify. (The single version was removed; the album version, which sounds identical and has the same identifying info, remains.) It became clear very quickly that this wasn’t his fault, and that many other artists were dealing with similar issues as Spotify moves to tighter policing of the platform and threatens distributors with $10 fines per artificially-streamed track. To explore the story further, I created a survey to collect responses from anyone with music on Spotify, especially those who got takedown notices in the last six months.

When I made the survey, I was not expecting to get scientific study-level data back. That would require a ton of responses, and any info I’d get would be likely to have some bias in it because it’s all self-reported. Dumping a bunch of cash into spreading it around with ads (so you’d see it on Instagram) or market research (so you’d see it on Survey Junkie) also didn’t feel correct. I’m a marketer sure, but I have enough journalism training to know I’m not Gallup.

So, knowing that simulating an actual poll would be a fool’s errand, I prioritized having real conversations. I spoke to people on Threads who were experiencing issues, jumped into conversations on Twitter’s ghost, asked old clients for input, and checked in with Pier on how things have gone since then.

And from the survey responses I did get back, there may not have been enough data to determine a trend, but there is enough data to see a problem.

Seven sources in the survey itself and plenty of context later, here’s what sticks out to me about the results:

• About half of the responding artists (3 of 7) have had music removed from streaming. The exact same artists also mentioned that they’ve seen their music appear on playlists that looked suspicious.

• All artists with removed songs were using pay-as-you-go distributors (such as DistroKid, the dominant choice of responders).

• When asked if they or someone they worked with had ever paid for artificial streams, every survey response answered “no.” This denial was repeated vocally on other platforms by many affected artists. While paid boosting absolutely happens and I’ve personally seen artists do it, what I’m seeing suggests that a lot more music is getting flagged than should be.

• More responders had submitted their songs to independent playlist curators than not. Many of these curators have very real followings. I’ve done it for my own work, and I’ve recommended it for others.

• The distrust musicians presently have of both streaming platforms and distributors (especially the pay-to-service distros) is palpable across social media. Just searching Music Threads for Spotify content is eye-opening all by itself.

• To that point: there is currently a community-led push to get Spotify to add a Remove From Playlist button. Without me knowing what this would take on a technical level, this is a pretty solid common-sense idea for where things currently are, as one of the core issues with ending up on a botted playlist is that the artists involved have almost no way to get their music down from one. These are not the only ways music is getting flagged for fraudulent streams, and this creates a visual akin to blaming the records in a record store for how the store’s bookkeeping is managed, but it’s something.

Ryan Walsh of Hallelujah The Hills ran into a curious cousin of this issue, when an 8-year-old song titled “Play It As It Loops” got served with a warning by Spotify, apparently for its title alone and not for fraudulent streams. Ironically, he’d directly written an article about Spotify’s “spam war” and its potential “chilling effect” in 2016, for VICE.

When I jumped into a thread Ryan had about this on X, he tagged notable music industry commentator Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500) in. Krukowski’s reply summarizes it perfectly:

That certainly pins it down in one heavy sentence. And that’s echoed in what Pier told me when we checked back in.

“The whole streaming infrastructure, as a reflection of the whole tech world, is doubling down on automation and AI tools, to carry out all these admin tasks that are required from both a creator and a consumer point of view,” Pier said. When “Hollow” was flagged, he was distributing through DistroKid - in other words, going through the biggest pay-as-you-go distributor to have his music on the biggest streaming platform available.

“After this experience,” Pier told me, “I’m starting to think that this current trend is making us unable to apply empathy to problem-solving procedures, be it the streaming platform or the distributor. Because everything is abstract and hidden behind incomprehensible codes, nobody is quite able to fix the issue. So from now on, the option of interfacing with an actual human being will be a key priority in every decision I will take in regards to my music shenanigans.”

And in a twist I promise I didn’t script for him - because it sounds an awful lot like what I help creative businesses do! - Pier had this to share, as well:

“Some other good advice I got was not to rely entirely on the big social media as well as the big platforms, and to make sure that I had a personal website, and more independent assets that would grant me more control over my own work. So, I’ll definitely move in this direction in the next while.”

I’ve been shifting heavily towards an easy-to-plug-into version of this kind of work with my own clients. (We’ll talk more about that next week - Ed.) But in the meantime, this has all given me a lot to consider.

Music streaming, as an ecosystem, is on a precarious edge. Precarious for the artists who feed it, certainly. But aside from that…precarious for whom?

Certainly not Spotify, a publicly-traded $57 billion company with shares hovering around $300 daily since April, near all-time highs set in 2021 - and only recently really pushing to raise monthly subscription prices from the $9.99 it had been in the US since 2011. (Yes, the value of music is higher than whatever you pay for a subscription, but that’s a totally separate point, even though it’s a really easy one to get applause for when yelled in a crowded room at a conference.)

Certainly not companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, tech giants who can get away with running their streaming services as a loss leader. If you think Spotify is huge, well…it’s about 1/60th of Apple’s market cap, as of today.

And yet, Spotify is the one with a free tier.

But it undoubtedly works for them. Spotify is presently valued at about half of Sony’s total valuation (not just the music division, the whole company). It’s valued roughly on par with Universal Music Group. And it’s three times the size of Warner Music Group, in terms of market cap. Those are the three major labels. Not tech companies in a tech boom, like Spotify.

And without cleaner customer service and more transparent policies from distributors and Spotify both, music streaming is starting to feel a lot more like social media than it ever has. All of that audio, and you can hear it for free if you’re cool with ads. Make a collaborative playlist with your friends. Most people have Spotify or can access it, so if you want to share a song you like, you’re probably sharing a Spotify link, whether your friends subscribe or not.

Spotify can do a free tier because it is also, quietly, a social network.

And just like social networks as we know them, Spotify’s importance comes from the people who rent space on it.

Just like the content on Twitter before Elon Musk bought it and made it into, well, whatever X is trying to be.

Increasingly, the main difference between Spotify and, say, Instagram, is that Meta isn’t kicking scores of bands off of its platforms on purpose. (Even though Meta has its own dodgy history with false-flagging creators, thanks to overactive AI moderation.)

And all of this means that using what you rent to push to what you own has never mattered more.

I should also say that, when I scanned social media sentiment and messaged some posters for this story, most of those I found who weren’t Ryan, Damon, or Pier seemed brutally…decentralized. Needing community, and not easily finding it. The greater democratization streaming - and social media, and the Internet - promised us all has come at the cost of support networks, and any time I’ve seen an algorithm that helped fix that, it was since shredded to become less helpful for anything but profit (hi again, X). What power does a voice have if it’s not one of several, but one of one, in the wilderness?

There are no easy answers to any of this, except to remember that these platforms and tools aren’t yours. The rest is a process. I’m here to help you set your marketing up in a way that helps you own much more of it. And even if you aren’t working with me directly, I’ll always have something to share below this line that can make your life a little easier each week.

Moving against powerlessness is best done by degrees. And however you do it, it’s best done together.

One Thing You Can Use Today

Ever have those days where you feel like you’re hitting a wall, with work or creatively? Do you sometimes have several of them?

If you have your basic needs taken care of (food, water, somewhere to live, enough income to pay bills), work on your mental health, and yet you still find yourself struggling, it can be a sign of burnout or of other things in your life that aren’t being addressed. Think kind of like procrastination but more generalized, like ennui and anxiety mixed into one weird cocktail.

I’ve been there. I have a method to address it that I managed to develop in a particularly difficult “stuck” moment, which has been so massively useful that I wish I’d thought of it years before that day. Having it earlier would have gained back so many lost days. Hopefully it helps you reclaim agency over your own time, too.

My “Momentum Tracker” is pretty simple, but if it helps you, you can build upon it. Here’s how to make one.

• Create a document somewhere. It could be in your phone notes, or on paper. Whatever you feel you’re most likely to have personally, and that you’ll look at once a day.

• Rate your positive momentum for what you’re working on (creative business, or just business) on a scale from 1 to 10, daily, for two weeks. This is highly subjective, but my guideline is roughly like this: 10 is “I am doing several times what I am generally capable of,” 5 is “I could do stuff, didn’t want to, but got through it,” and 1 is “I cancelled everything and now I am in bed.” 

• Minor spoiler: neither 10, nor 1, are sustainable long-term. 

• Do not include days off or sick days in your rankings. These should always exist on their own, and you should take them! If you had a really productive day off for things you wanted to do on a very personal level, you can make a note of that, but don’t include it with this.

• I personally like rating the day I’m having after lunch, so that if I need to adjust for it, I can do so in my working hours. You may want to do it on wakeup, or at the end of a day. If you do it on wakeup, rate the day prior.

• If you have a day that feels especially difficult, take a minute to note what’s on your mind, and then to note things that could solve the issue. I do this right in the tracker, but you can do it however you wish.

• At the end of that two weeks, take stock of all the days you rated, and then average them together.

The goal here, contrary to what the productivity hack bros would tell you, is not to be a perfectionist with this. The key is to have 7 and 8 be closer to the norm, and minimal days below a 5. And if you are having days at a 2 or a 1, this isn’t a character defect - instead, it’s something to look at, and try to address before it eats more of your time.

Notice the patterns you have. What I’ve found, in doing this myself, is that it makes me more conscious of difficult internal and external dynamics, and also brings to light issues that I may be pushing aside by focusing on work and movement. That only works in the short term. This allows for more direct solutions, and it can help you get back to a productive baseline even when one has not existed for some time.

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, July 19 - ReSolute w/ Eli Escobar @ H0L0
Eli Escobar has been one of the most consistent forces in the disco-leaning parts of NYC nightlife for ages, and he’s got the main room to himself tonight at H0L0. If you haven’t been to this venue since it was an avant-garde space pre-Covid, get ready, because it’s morphed into the kind of place you can happily dance at until well past last call.

Saturday, July 20 - Certain Death, Night Spins, Tilden, Tony and The Kiki, Tula Vera @ Maria Hernandez Park (free)
Bushwick is the place to be for indie rock and pop this Saturday. This is the most stacked bill I’ve ever seen for a free Maria Hernandez show. Starts at 2:45pm, goes until 7pm, and you should probably go see all of it. I’ve paid to see at least three of these bands play clubs.

Saturday, July 20 - Wormfest @ Brooklyn Made
This is also a stacked Bushwick bill for indie, leaning a little more pop. Miette Hope hasn’t played a show in a little while and has some demos that have knocked me out lately, and Razor Braids just put a new album out a couple months back. Sunday, the hottest club in NYC will likely involve me sleeping.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.