Last week, Josh Sahunta, a singer-songwriter based in Nashville, received a strange text from a friend and collaborator: Why had he removed his album Mellowdrama from Spotify? The 2022 LP was one of Sahunta’s most-streamed projects and contributed significantly to his streaming royalty income. He had no reason to take the album down himself, and no idea what his friend was talking about.
Searching for answers, Sahunta saw that much of the album was not only grayed out on Spotify, but also his account with DistroKid, the largest music distribution platform by volume. Soon, Mellowdrama would disappear from Apple Music, YouTube, and other streaming platforms, too. But Sahunta couldn’t find any reason for the takedowns until he contacted DistroKid customer support directly.
They told him Mellowdrama — which Sahunta wrote and recorded himself — had been flagged for copyright infringement. They did not say what recordings he’d allegedly infringed upon, nor name a rightsholder filing the claim. But DistroKid nevertheless hit Sahunta with a copyright strike, freezing his royalty payments and potentially hindering his ability to put out future releases.
Sahunta sent a flurry of emails trying to fix the mistake. After receiving no replies, he decided to share his story on Instagram last Tuesday and his comments and DMs were flooded with messages from other artists dealing with the exact same problem.
Independent artists, Sahunta tells Rolling Stone, “are unfortunately the most powerless group in the music industry. And the irony is we comprise the majority of music on streaming, yet we’re so easily taken advantage of and screwed over by these companies that claim they are for independent artists… They’re preying on the people that are paying for their services and keeping their businesses afloat.”
DistroKid has since acknowledged the issue in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “A very small number of recordings distributed through DistroKid have been removed in response to claims made by [Universal Music Group],” Distrokid’s Vice President of Artist Services, Amanda Ferri, said. (It’s unclear how many legitimate artists have been affected by the takedowns.)
UMG filed a lawsuit against DistroKid in September, accusing the distributor of deceptive business practices and “blatant” copyright infringement. Despite promoting itself as a ”leading music distributor for artist-backed releases,” the lawsuit claims DistroKid has been “flooding platforms with AI-generated ‘slop’ that siphons revenue and listeners from legitimate artists and right holders.”
Universal Music Group did not immediately return a request for comment.
“We strongly dispute the allegations underlying UMG’s lawsuit and regret the disruption to affected artists,” Ferri continued. “We are working to minimize that disruption while protecting artists’ ability to release their music.” (This statement was first shared with The Verge, which reported on the takedowns last week.)
Among the offenses alleged in the suit, UMG said DistroKid allows users to upload unauthorized remixes or sped-up versions of copyright-protected songs to streaming services, as well as straight-up instrumental copies that have new vocals laced over them. UMG further claimed that DistroKid lets uploaders attach protected album art to infringing tracks, potentially confusing listeners and tricking them into playing the wrong song.
At one point, UMG’s lawsuit highlighted several of DistroKid’s high-volume account holders, which boast names like “Lofi Chill,” “Chill Flow Radio,” and “Mellow Vibes Radio,” and regularly distribute hundreds of tracks a month. Noting these “production rates are implausible for any human artist,” UMG claimed a “technical analysis” of these catalogs confirmed that “the vast majority of their tracks… are raw outputs from the AI song generator, Suno.” (UMG is involved in a separate copyright infringement suit with Suno, accusing it of training its model on protected recordings.)
“DistroKid’s willingness to be a home for such sham artists has inured to its benefit. Its distribution rate has exploded in the AI era,” the lawsuit claims, noting at one point that DistroKid recently sold a majority stake to a private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners, for $2 billion.
Like many companies or organizations that find themselves facing massive copyright infringement claims, DistroKid appears to have taken steps to remove some of the allegedly infringing content it may have helped place on streaming platforms (while still, as noted in the statement above, denying UMG’s underlying claims). How so much original music, like Sahunta’s, got caught up in this scraping operation remains unclear.
Joel Gouveia, an artist manager who wrote about the takedowns on his Substack last week, believes DistroKid likely used some kind of algorithm or AI-based program to root out potentially infringing songs. But as Gouveia notes to Rolling Stone, these AI detection tools are themselves still relatively new and imperfect.
“Instead of taking the precautionary [measure], taking their time, using humans to figure out if this music is in fact made by humans, they mitigated the risk,” he tells Rolling Stone. “They just did mass takedowns. I think, at the end of the day, they will fix it and hopefully these artists won’t be completely SOL [shit outta luck], but it’s really sad to see.”
(DistroKid declined to comment further on the tools it used to issue the takedowns, or the efforts its taking to rectify erroneous notices.)
As of Monday, Oct. 12, much of Sahunta’s Mellowdrama is still grayed out on Spotify and is completely unavailable on Apple Music and YouTube. The silver lining, such as it is, is that by sharing his story on Instagram, other distributors have offered him deals. But he remains wary that this could just as easily happen elsewhere.
“I think the real lesson for me here was just that, as an independent artist who doesn’t have the infrastructure of a label to help prevent these things and advocate for me: when something like this happens, I’m powerless,” Sahunta says. “I can’t really do anything to defend myself.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
