The removals answer Universal's claims
Artists have said on social media that DistroKid took their work down without notice. DistroKid confirmed to The Verge that the takedowns are a direct response to claims made by Universal Music Group. The label filed a lawsuit in September. The complaint's wording is that DistroKid created an "AI-slop pipeline," a channel for low-quality AI songs. Artists say works that were not made by AI were caught up in the removals.
The company does not give a total for the takedowns in this report, and it does not give the rule used on each song. The cases below are the musicians' own accounts.
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The people named say nobody told them why
Musician McGwire says six of his songs were removed from streaming. He says DistroKid did not contact him before or after the removals, and that he had to ask. One track is a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely," which he says he had properly licensed. Another used a beat he bought in a marketplace, a beat others had also licensed. The case that angered him most was a song removed for an uncleared sample. The song he was accused of sampling was released two years after his own track.
Music producer Jesse Cannon told The Verge that DistroKid gave up on customer service about two years ago. He said the company should have let artists contest a removal and should have warned them first. He also said former employees told him the company treats customer service as a waste of profit because its market share is already high. That is Cannon's account of what he was told.
Nerdcore rapper Insane Ian posted that an original song was taken down with no warning, and that the company would not say why. Rapper King Chase told The Verge that an entire album by an artist he had been working with was removed, with no communication and no explanation. He said the album had been up for three to four years and had not had a copyright strike.
[1]The company says the number is small and disputes the claims
Amanda Ferri, DistroKid's vice president of artist services, told The Verge that a very small number of recordings distributed through DistroKid were removed in response to UMG's claims. The company strongly disputes the allegations underlying the lawsuit, regrets the disruption to affected artists, and says it is working to minimize that disruption while protecting artists' ability to release their music.
This article records the confirmed removals and what each side said. It does not explain how to decide whether a song was generated by a model, and it does not turn the cases above into a count of every removal.
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