Rev Left Radio - Spotify Is Deleting Our Episodes... (ANNOUNCEMENT)

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Best Of Series (creating a clean back-catalogue) starts tomorrow. Join the Patreon - even for free - to get new public episodes in the meantime. We will also be putting new episodes out on the Red Menace feed (subscribe on your preferred podcast app) ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Spotify is taking down hundreds, I think, of our episodes. I think the last time I checked, it was over 160 episodes in our back catalog are basically being erased and not allowed up on the Spotify platform. Now, I can't act like this is not something that I knew might come one day. Since the very early days of Rev left, 2017 is when we started. AI copyright scanning wasn't a thing. We didn't think that we'd get this big at all in the early days. And I had always infused the episodes with music, often, you know, independent, underground music, sometimes bigger artists at the end of our free episodes only, right?

And my logic at the time was just that these episodes are free. I'm not making money off them. You know, you have an hour, two hours, three hours of conversation, and then you have a couple minutes of an outro song. And if anything, it's just exposing artists to new listeners, right? And I know for a fact that that's occurred over the years. People have reached out and said, you know, I listen to Bamboo because I heard them on your show or, you know, AJJ or Mount Erie or a million others. And so I figured, you know, it's either neutral for an artist or benefits the artist just to have their song freely played on the end of a free episode.

Nobody's benefit. Nobody's profiting off of anybody else's music or pretending that it's their own, right? There's not plagiarism or anything. And it added a really cool, emotional, aesthetic vibe at the end of our episodes. You know, just like the music itself could add a certain aesthetic vibe or the lyrics itself could be relevant to the content of the thing we had just discussed. And so I always loved doing that. And I got feedback all the time, you know, from people who loved it as well and discovered

amazing new music from that. But as AI has gotten better, as platforms like Spotify have implemented AI scanning into their platforms, it's now, we're hitting that inevitable brick wall where they're saying, hey, this is copyrighted material you're not allowed to have. Just like on YouTube, if you were to, you know, post some copyrighted material, it would just demonetize it or it would take out that part or whatever the case may be. And so Spotify is now a big enough platform with music incorporated onto its platform and with the AI tools now to scan all podcasts and, you know, raise red flags when that occur so um they're taking all our all our old well not all of them but a vast majority of our old

episodes down and some of them do fall under fair use like when i did like nina simone and billy holiday episodes we played their music in the context of discussing their music and their art and i you know pushed back on spotify and said this falls under fair use um and and other episodes we had you know permission from artists to use a very small artist that we had contacted but a lot of them are just are just not able to to keep up um and so we have a couple options the options would be to go back to every single one of our old episodes open them up in in pro tools take off the music re-upload them um but that costs money because um the rSS feed cost you money if you if you do too many uploads and too short of a time um so you know you try to do you try to take down and

re-upload 15, 20 new episodes in a couple days, you go way past the amount of storage that your RSS feed can, you know, the capacity that it has. And so it's going to charge you more money, et cetera. And it's just incredibly time consuming. And it's incredibly expensive to do all of that. And just for one platform. And most of our listens come on Apple podcast. I think Spotify is our second biggest platform that people listen to us on. But then there's a bunch of other smaller platforms that people listen to us on. So it won't affect everybody, but it does suck because when we get new listeners, you know, and assuming that a chunk of them at least 30, 40 percent are, you know, listening to us on Spotify, they'll often go back and go through our back

catalog. Maybe not every single show. I mean, at this point, we have eight plus years, hundreds of episodes. But they go back and they listen to a bunch of our back catalog episodes. And to know that, you know, somebody on Spotify might not know. that huge swaths of our catalog are taken off of that platform and only have an impoverished back catalog to go through, you know, that bothers me. So I just want to let people know that Spotify is doing that. I don't love copyright laws in this country if nobody's making money and we're just spreading music and it's adding to the vibe of a creative thing that we're doing. You know, I don't see the harm in it, but I understand that I don't control the laws and

copyright law in particular is difficult to navigate and often obscure and it's unclear sometimes you know if you're allowed to use something or if fair use is in play or not and and also all those complications exist but again if you are on any other platform you will still have access to our full back catalog we also post our back catalog on onto patreon all our all our patreon apps and our public apps are posted on patreon so people that are supporters of the show can obviously continue to have access to that but we also think that okay if Spotify's doing this now it's only a matter of time perhaps before other platforms start doing something like this and so we have to do a twofold reaction to that one is we have to stop using music going forward it's just not worth

having our entire back catalog taken down it's not worth the the trouble and the headache that these platforms like Spotify are going to bring down on us if we continue to use music and I don't want to show in the episodes to continually be a threat of being taken down. And then the second thing is, is that specifically for Spotify, but just in general, I want to create a back catalog of copyright-free episodes. So some of our best episodes over the last several years, we're going to put those back out. We are going to take them down.

We're going to take the music off the end. We're going to put copyright-free music or just like a little thing at the end, like a little instrumental beat or something as an outro beat to the episodes, and we're going to re-upload those. And so what that's going to be is a best-of series starting this week, starting probably tomorrow, where for 60 days straight, once a day we are going to release a best-of episodes. Some of our classic canon, if you will, episodes will be coming out one a day for the next 60 days. And what we're trying to do with that is to create not our full back catalog, but a clean back catalog of our best of. And we're seeing in the era of Trump and, you know, everything that's

happening in politics right now we are seeing, and I think, you know, probably lots of left-wing creators see, see this. We're seeing an influx of listeners, of people that are curious about alternative ways of doing things as this system breaks down in front of everybody's eyes and turns into its more reactionary phase. People are looking for alternatives. And so we have, seen a spike of new listeners. And so if we can put out a best of series that is copyright free that can act as a sort of concentrated clean back catalog for new listeners and old listeners alike to go through and listen to some of our best ever episodes, we think that that will be great. And then moving forward, we won't be using music. So even if everything eventually

that has any sort of music and it gets taken down in the future, we will have at least this solid back catalog of 60 of our best of episodes and then going forward all of our episodes after that point will be clean um so what that means though is that we're not going to be able to release new episodes on our feed for two months for 60 days straight um so what i will be doing in lieu of that is operating on the patreon not only just behind the patreon paywall where you know i'm putting out specific content for those who support the show but also publicly on patreon so if you just You can go become a member for free, right? You won't get access to the paywalled content,

but you can go in, become a member for free. I think you can get an RSS feed. You can put into your preferred podcast app or just download the Patreon app. And then whenever we post free episodes on the Patreon, you can listen to them. So as the Best of series is coming out on our RSS feed, on Apple, on Spotify, et cetera,

our Patreon feed will have Patreon content. Plus, if anything comes up that needs to be talked about, we'll have public episodes over there as well. So, you know, let's say we're 15 days into our best of release and some crazy shit happens. And, you know, Allison and I want to talk about it. We'll, we'll talk about it and we'll release it for free publicly on our Patreon. And in the meantime, the best of series will continue to play out on the main feed. So I hope that's clear. I hope people understand why we're doing it. It really hurts to let go of the musical aspect of our show. you know David and I had talked about it many times in the past like thinking like you know eventually this is going to happen but I just said it I just thought it's a free show I know I'm not doing anything immoral and it really adds an aesthetic musical element to the show that I don't want to lose you know and I think now Spotify is ripping our fingers off of clinging to that and we're going to have to adapt and move forward without that without that musical element David has to

talked about maybe creating a playlist and putting it in the show notes that we constantly update for people that are interested in continuing to hear songs and music that, you know, the type of music that would go on our episodes, maybe, you know, just having a playlist, you can go check out that music that we're constantly updating and adding songs to. That could be a cool stand in, a plan B kind of, to keep a musical element to the show for those that are particularly interested in that liked finding new music. through the show. So that's what we're going to have to do. So in summary, Spotify's taking down 160 plus of our episodes on its platform only. As of now, all those episodes will still be up on

every other platform, but there might come a day when that's no longer the case. So in the face of that and better AI technology scanning for music and copyrighted material, we are moving forward without music. And we are putting up over the next 60 days a clean back catalog of some of our best of episodes to create a safe back catalog that new listeners and old listeners alike can refer to and go back to as we continue to go forward with copyright-free episodes in the future. And in the meantime, we will be doing anything that comes up, any episodes we record that aren't specifically behind the Patreon paywall. We'll still be put up on Patreon for free to the public and you can go to Patreon. You can download the app. You can

become a member of the show without having to pay money and get access to any public episodes we post on our Patreon in that 60 day period when we're not going to be able to come on the main feed and address any political events, current events or have any public episodes as we're putting out that clean back catalog. So I hope that's all clear. Again, not trying to play the victim here. This is something that, you know, we knew might one day come and it is here. And so we're just trying to problem solve. We're trying to adapt. And we're trying to keep the show safe going forward.

So I hope everybody understands that. And the back catalog is a great opportunity. Even for people that have listened to the show for years, episodes have almost certainly gotten past you. You've been busy for a week. You missed it. You know, you weren't listened to a podcast. You had something going on in your life.

And you might have missed some of these episodes. So even if you're a hardcore listener of Rev. left and try to more or less listen to every show going back and going through this best of will almost certainly pop up a few episodes that you had missed in the past and these are awesome episodes these are great episodes and so um i think yeah for long time listeners and new listeners are like the best of series will ultimately be a really cool thing and every single day you'll get a new classic rev left app so um i hope people enjoy that and uh i look forward to to moving forward past this obstacle and creating a nice clean back catalog and a nice clean copyright-free future

for the show to keep those all future apps up. So thank you so much to everybody who supports the show. Again, you can join us on Patreon as a free member for public apps or support the show directly through Patreon as on a monthly basis for $5 a month. The cost of a cup of coffee, you get access to our Patreon. It supports my family. It supports David's family. It's the only way that this show will ever be funded. We don't have advertisers. We never will. There's no big money investments. It is 100% listener funded always and forever. And if you don't want to join a monthly subscription, you can support us at buy me a coffee.com forward slash rev left radio. We'll put the link in the show notes of this. And on that front, you can just give us a one-time donation and call it

good. And we really deeply appreciate that. Like, you know, people might know there's plenty of medical debt that I'm dealing with. And so anything that supports the show, keeps the show going, and helps us financially is deeply appreciated by both of our families. All right. So thank you so much to everybody who listens to Rev Left, and I really hope people enjoy the best of series starting tomorrow. Love and Solidary.

We're going to be able to be. Thank you.