Video description:
As many of you have already noticed, I have taken my music off Spotify entirely… for the time being. The reason is their new updated terms and conditions which in short format says they can take all of our content that we put out there, and use it for any reason, purpose, altered or not… and not pay us a single dime for it! As if the tiny fraction of a pittance they already are paying us for streams wasn’t enough (or little depending on how you look at it). As Josh Raines and Krystle Delgado so eloquently explains it (clips in this video), it is a total disaster for the creators. So therefore I took a long weighted choice to remove my music from Spotify for now - if they change the conditions, I may of course put it back up again.
Likewise with AI contend - which is something I just cannot abide. AI is fine for long boring Teams meeting summaries and help with programming, searching etc, but when it’s taking over and flooding the domain of us hard working musicians and graphical artists among others, it’s simply not acceptable! I create all my work by hand – brick by brick, note for note – always! There are no shortcuts here, everything is played manually and recorded painstakingly, just as with all the helpers I have doing guitars, sax, vocals and other instruments.
The only tiny AI help I use, is when I sometimes want to do a remix or a cover of a great song and have to separate the vocals or other instruments so I can do my own backing tracks. And for that I use lalal.ai since I don’t have access to the original recordings and probably never will anyway. That, and the starting point when I do mastering after mixdown using Izotope’s Ozone plugin, but I always end up dialing all those parameters way down and change just about everything anyway.
So on all my channels you will now see the logo I created, showing that this is an AI-free zone and that you can truly rely on the fact that you are listening to someone’s hard work and that your money actually goes to someone who hopefully deserves those little pennies.
For those wanting to brand their own work, feel free to copy and use the logos if you feel like it:
Spotify is easily the worst music streaming service anyway. Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer are all better.