A few months ago I found one of my fav albums removed by Spotify.
A few weeks later my best friend found their band's album removed as well after they received an email from their distributor reporting fake/bot repeated plays in Spotify.
The band explained that they hadn't made these plays and they are not responsible for other people's actions (which is completely logical) but Spotify & CDBaby said that the album will be removed. Additionally there were many arguments like that this was a symphonic, difficult to make, album with long tracks (4-5 mins), released 6 years ago and with ZERO issues on ALL other platforms like Deezer etc so they documented well that they surely hadn't the profile of making money with fake plays and all this situation in Spotify was very unfair....
The even craziest thing follows....!
Suddenly, some time after the above incident (a couple of weeks ago) , the band received an email from Spotify that their.... new release is going public...! (Despite the fact that they hadn't completed their second album yet)
Long story short, they noticed that someone else (A chinese or Japanese artist copied their band's name and abused their page in Spotify) using their Spotify page in order to release an alien to their music album !!
The band immediately asked from Spotify to remove the album because it is not theirs but Spotify refused (!) saying some crazy things about metadata strategy that don't allow them to remove an album.
My friend even opened a chat explaining everything and saying that now it makes perfect sense how their original music was removed because of supposed fake plays which someone else inflicted (intentionally in order to take over their name & profile...?).
The first assistant after calling an extra person (supervisor?) into the chat, the outcome was exactly the same: Spotify's representative gave the same negative answer, refusing to remove the album coming from the entity that stole the band's name and pirated their profile.... all this took place with an almost automated msg making the artist unable to answer anything more !!!
This way, the Spotify representative practically "legalized " this piracy action of stealing the band's name and profile. (& of course every logical person can easily think that after all this bot attacking thing of the near past, resulting in the unfair removal of the original band's album, had most possibly taken place from the aspirants who badly wanted to proceed in stealing the band's name & profile ).
All this sad story reveals how bad is Spotify's policy, lacking basic logic, turning blind eyes to artist's problems and unfair situations and finally conducting unethical practices of any potential bad actors.
Just insane.
*I am attaching even the pdf from their chat as my friend hadn't community profile here and there is no other way to find their right besides social media and maybe a lawyer in the end.
