Earlier this year I tried to make my second submission of a music album to Routenote, which has a unique and useful "free" streaming submission service. I worried that my first submission might not meet their standards but it sailed right through, encouraging me to do a second album and possibly meet my longstanding goal of 5 album submissions before the year end.
I had previously released 3 out of 4 of the songs on this otherwise new album on an earlier album I had released on Tunecore ten years ago. That earlier album had used on my first and last names as artist name. I have recently decided to include my middle name for uniqueness, so I did that for this new album and every song on it.
I figured I could get away with this change for several reasons. For one, it's the same name really just with a middle name added. For another I had only "streamed" the previous album for a few years, from 2006-2009 or so. It had not been played very much. I had not paid for distribution since 2009, 13 years ago. Nobody would remember it now, I figured.
But then after uploading this second album, I discovered that Shazam could identify 2 out of 3 of the tracks from the earlier album. At this point I suspected the release would probably fail because of the apparent (but not real) copyright violation, since two different artist names were being used (really just my same name but with middle name added).
I waited ever more nervously for 10 days for the official notice from Routenote. Somehow I missed it and started working on finalizing a third album for the year. I was almost there when I discovered that Routenote had in fact fairly quickly issued a rejection 3 days after submission.
The rejection gave a long list of potential problems with the release. The very first on the list was Copyright Violation. But then it also listed a number of technical and aesthetic issues.
The rejection notice only said the release could have been flagged for any of the following reasons. But it did not actually say which one(s) were involved. I emailed Routenote support and they told me they could not give me any more information. (I suspect much of the process is automated, and the automated system might use AI which is incapable of determining which actual issue(s) were involved. Well that's what you get for using a free or even low cost service.)
Well this threw a spanner into the works. There are blog entries on how to deal with artist name changes, but it doesn't look trivial. I was not in the mood to try to figure out how to deal with the issue. And in fact I still am not. Maybe next year.
But what was worse was that the negative feeling this gave me put a stop to my finishing my "third" album, which was almost ready to go. I simply couldn't work on it anymore, knowing that any one of the long list of technical and aesthetic criteria listed could lead to it being rejected too, just like the second album. Really the third album was no worse than the first one on technical and artistic grounds, which had sailed right through, so I figured I probably wouldn't have a problem. But probably wasn't good enough. I felt hurt and just didn't want to continue any work on it (and still haven't).
So this was a case of being buried under an ambiguous rejection. Because I don't really know what caused my second album to be rejected (though I think I have a pretty good theory) I'm finding it hard to go on with something else.
For all I know, this is a hidden benefit of the system. Perhaps I'm not bothering anyone else with hearing how bad my music is, and perhaps that's a benefit to all. But what about with someone more musical than me?
Now today I've been faced with a different kind of unhelpful rejection. I tried to post a short and I thought helpful (and not at all abusive) comment to Gilbert Doctorow's blog. After some work, I submitted it, and got the simple report that my comment was rejected. "Sorry" was the only explanation.
It could have been (and likely was) that the post in question was already closed for comments. If so, it would have been more helpful not to allow me to write one. Or perhaps it took too long to finish the comment (I was doing other things like feeding cats before finally submitting it).
But it means, once again, I don't feel much like posting more comments to Doctorow. Perhaps, once again, that's actually a benefit for all.
No comments:
Post a Comment