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. 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. 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.) Related Content Grimes Reveals First Taste of AI-Inspired 'Psy Opera' The First Music Streaming Fraud Case Gets Caught Up in Trump's Dumb AI Rebrand Music Streaming Fraudster Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison ‘Artificial’ Gives Us the Beginning of the AI-Fueled End. It’s Terrifying “DistroKid’s willingness to be a home for such sham artists has inured to its benefit.
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