DistroKid Pulls Indie Songs in UMG Lawsuit Response — SkimNews
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- DistroKid removed Josh Sahunta's 2022 album "Mellowdrama" from Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube without specifying the alleged infringement or naming a rightsholder, then issued him a copyright strike and froze his royalty payments.
- Sahunta learned he wasn't alone after posting about the takedowns on Instagram — his DMs and comments filled with messages from other independent artists hit by the same opaque removals.
- DistroKid VP of Artist Services Amanda Ferri acknowledged "a very small number of recordings" were pulled in response to UMG claims, but declined to say how many legitimate artists were affected or what detection tools were used.
- UMG's September lawsuit accuses DistroKid of "flooding platforms with AI-generated 'slop'" and alleges high-volume accounts like "Lofi Chill" and "Mellow Vibes Radio" push out hundreds of tracks a month — tracks UMG's "technical analysis" identified as outputs from the AI song generator Suno.
- The UMG suit notes DistroKid recently sold a majority stake to private equity firm CVC Capital Partners for $2 billion as its distribution volume "exploded in the AI era."
- Artist manager Joel Gouveia told Rolling Stone the takedowns appear to have been carried out by an algorithm, criticizing DistroKid for prioritizing "risk mitigation" via mass removals over human verification of infringement claims.
- As of Monday, Oct. 12, most of Mellowdrama remained grayed out on Spotify and fully unavailable on Apple Music and YouTube, with Sahunta telling Rolling Stone independent artists are "the most powerless group in the music industry."
Why it matters: Independent artists, whom UMG's own lawsuit acknowledges make up the majority of streaming music, are losing catalog availability and royalty income to opaque automated takedowns issued by a distributor that just fetched a $2 billion private equity valuation — and DistroKid declined to disclose how it distinguishes infringing spam from legitimate music before issuing strikes.
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