I've delisted the podcasts I'm involved with from Spotify.
You can still get them from other places, of course. The
canonical source is the various home pages: Whartson
Hall, Improvised Radio Theatre
with Dice and Ribbon of
Memes, eachof which has an associated
RSS feed. I've never been entirely happy with podcast aggregation
services, but listeners asked me to get the shows on there, and I did.
But Spotify has been sending me increasing numbers of spurious
copyright violation complaints. There's never anything specific, just
a statement to the effect that "this episode appears to contain
copyrighted material", so for each one—sometimes ten or fifteen in a
day—I've had to check the episode, work out what pieces of music I
used, then find out where that composer's public statement of open
licence is now (which may well not be where it was when I chose the
piece eight years ago, if it's even to be found at all). All of this
has to go through a very slow Spotify web form, and then a week or two
later the episode is restored (never with any apology or even
acknowledgement). And of course each of these takedowns demands an
instant response or they'll just lock the thing out permanently. I
could easily take an hour a day or more just to unblock things, and I
don't have the time for it.
So rather than present listeners with a catalogue full of holes, I'd
rather not present it at all.
(This hasn't happened at all on iTunes. Nor on the shows' home pages.
Only on Spotify, which I assume has an API for bulk sending of
takedown requests and no burden of evidence or penalty for false
reporting.)
If this makes life less convenient for you, I apologise. This is
nothing to do with Spotify's happily taking over from music publishers
as the greedy middleman who keeps musicians hungry, nor its
encouragement of AI slop, nor even its willingness to run recruiting
ads for ICE (which I'm told it has now stopped). It is simply that I
am unable, as a single uploader, to spend the time it would take to
keep the back catalogue intact.