The Spotify Music Purge 2021 Issue “February Edition’’

Thousands of songs were gone from the Spotify Catalogue on January 1st and Artists were targeting Distrokid and Spotify as the culprit. What happened? New answers came to light.

If you’re an Independent or Signed Artist you should check regularly your music on Spotify, are all your songs there?

A month has passed since this situation happened and I found some answers to some of the questions artists and managers were asking.

-Was this a Distrokid issue?

No, the move came from Spotify alone in a way to stop artificial streaming from happening. The fact most artists were from Distrokid was because they are the biggest music distributor for independent music at the moment.

They distribute 1/3 of all Independent music alone and daily they work with around 35.000 songs for distribution to all streaming services.

-Did Spotify returned some of the music?

Yes they did, some distributors (Distrokid included) offered artist a Document to reclaim their songs, one of the managers I work with got all the songs back from the artist showing proof of Marketing Campaign, Facebook ads, Blogs etc…. (As we are part of their promotion, we cooperated and sent all the marketing campaigns and blogs we did for them)

Social media was a really important part of this success, big numbers on Spotify translate to big numbers on social media, this means your fandom and following can back up your number of streams.

-Did Spotify finally added a captcha to stop bot accounts from being created?

It looks like they did, they increased control over account creation and in multiple cases my team and I found a captcha when login in, hopefully this is implemented for everybody and will stop bot farms soon.

The downside of this is their request to artist to ask fans, family and friends to stop streaming their music on repeat (example: repeat a song overnight)

Isn’t the point of good music to be listened on repeat when you love a song? For Spotify’s Algorithm, it might lead to be…