Artist Mapping Issues (intellectual property meta data squatting / artistic identity theft in the streaming era) - The death of the Wild West internet and my dad… an artists perspective:
I’m so exhausted. I hardly want to explain this one single more time ever again… but I do genuinely want to know what y’all think of all of this.
If you search for Kid Indigo you will probably see my face, you will most certainly learn my birthday, but you may end up listening to songs by some other guy on profiles generated by experimental bedroom pop I self distributed (through the service TuneCore) in 2014 and 2015.
In 2013 I got pretty into SoundCloud and felt it was going so well I oughta legitimize and “officially” distribute my music to “stores” and streaming services beginning with an EP, Kaleidoscopic, in 2014 and then a full album in 2015, Dyad of Larks.
iTunes was still the main store and people were still buying digital releases and listening to them on their own device, offline. A real “physical” audio file or files (digital release) was purchased and kept, forever, we still have them do we not? I know I do…
Spotify had only just come into existence (for the U.S.) July 2011. It wouldn’t explain to Germany, Australia, and New Zealand until 2012. Streaming was still the bold new terrain.
I recently got that stupid lifetime version of Spotify wrapped and was reminded that the very first song I ever played was my own (Kid Indigo - Who Biit My Lip) in late December, 2015. It had been released a year prior but I hadn’t bothered to explore the platform myself until the release of my album Dyad of Larks (2015) was getting played on college radio stations in Los Angles and some DJ’s had started using Spotify to make playlists of their sets.
The artist profile element of streaming came later, with no profile management apart from basic bios and profiles pulled from a meta data provider, Rovi.
In 2014 when I first released my EP, the only way to update a profile was to send an email a bio and JPEG profile picture to content.music@rovicorp (.com) but even this was not advertised or explicitly clear.
By November 2015 Spotify launched its first analytics dashboard called “Fan Insights” which still had no profile management. In July 2016 they updated the Fan Insights dashboard to allow artists to upload their own profile picture.
April 2017 Fan Insights rebranded and became the modern “Spotify For Artists” platform. In September 2017 they finally completely cut ties with Rovi (the meta data provider it initially used) and instead introduced the “Artist Bio” feature in Spotify For Artist.
The California End Of Life Option Act took effect June 9, 2016.
December 22, 2017 my dad, terminally ill with stage 4 colon cancer and a resident of the state of California, chose to end his own life using a drug cocktail prescribed to him (Medical Aid in Dying).
During this time I spaced out and failed to pay my distribution fee on time and my releases expired, leaving my profiles uninhabited and able to be “claimed” by another artist releasing songs using my name.
The YouTube topic channel initially generated by my releases (which I followed from my personal account) became someone else’s “official artist channel”.
I’m 2019 I had given up on trying to deal with tunecore to retrieve my lost profiles and opted to redistribute my catalogue with a new distributor, DistroKid.
It’s been six years and I’m still hopelessly entangled with this little bully squatting on my meta data, making no contribution to the effort of differentiating… he is practically a ghost, with no obvious personal presence or identity apart from his adopting my previously established artist name and brand, Kid Indigo, as his own.