The album Andante took a little longer to appear on Apple Music – a week longer than Spotify or Tidal, actually. When I checked the tracks I discovered to my horror that the second and fifth track played the wrong music… The second track, 2 Alone / On an Island, from the album vision 2020, was playing the music that was supposed to be on the fifth track, Dreamy Afternoon, and vice versa. Using Shazam I discovered that both were uploaded with identical ISRC (the digital code that identifies every song… that’s how Shazam works and that’s how publishing royalties are figured out) – because both pieces show up as 2 Alone / On an Island.
I never made this kind of mistake before but the process is largely automatic now and I can’t see how this mixup could have happened without me making the mistake. Unless it was a glitch in the software… that’s quite possible, too. What to do? The next morning I sent an email to UnitedMasters support. I was told that the smoothest way to fix the situation would be to create a new and correct upload of the album and when that was published on the services I should issue a takedown order for the older version that had the mistake. That made sense to me and I proceeded to upload the music and album cover again. I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the music files against the titles, compared the ISRC codes and so on.
Several hours later I was informed that so-called fingerprinting software had flagged three tracks as not being mine to release… I knew that those three songs would be the three tracks from Fete. I had the same problem when I uploaded the July 2nd version but at the time a senior support team member had quickly overridden the flags when I explained that the flags were outdated. The album Fete used to be distributed by The Orchard until last Spring, when I decided to remove the album from that distributor and release it through UnitedMasters, where all my other HuHeartDrive albums were distributed. The Orchard simply hadn’t updated their data base and the software was still fingerprint-hunting for my music even though it wasn’t theirs any longer. 24 hours later, the new corrected version of the album is still in limbo and I have come to the decision that if UnitedMasters is creating more problems I will cancel my account with them. Perhaps it’s a sign that none of my music from the past five years should be distributed to streaming services, not even this one compilation. It’s cleaner this way.
Update:
This morning I decided to issue a takedown for the album Andante. As of a few days from now, none of my music since 2018 will stream. My apologies to those who were enjoying Andante on a streaming service. The album remains available on Bandcamp, of course. I am working on CD release of the album. We haven’t had any merch on tour since Covid and this album would be a nice release to offer.
Ha! I broke the system… now Shazam recognizes Dreamy Afternoon as 2 Alone / On an Island even though the ISRC is different. I have decided this is hilarious and the ghost in the machine is having some fun. :-)
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