You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Stephanie Winn (00:00.672)
This is a public service announcement. This is what an episode of my podcast sounds like without its beautiful theme song, Half Awake by Joey Pecorero. And this is what Spotify wants you to hear, if it wants you to hear my podcast at all. See, I use Spotify. I use it to listen to music. I listen to podcasts on Spotify and

I've heard in the past that they don't treat musical artists very well in terms of their system for distributing money, but I'm now learning that their way of treating podcasters and the intersection of podcasting and music is really incredibly stupid. Get this. So I own the rights.

to use my theme song, Half Awake by Joey Pecorero. I have a contract from October, 2021, back when I was first planning my podcast. And actually, let me tell you that story, because it's a great story. This was fall of 2021 when I was planning the podcast, and I was letting a lot of things come to me during that time by creative inspiration. And one day I was home by myself doing my thing in my space.

and Half Awake by Joey Pecorero came on Spotify where I was listening to music and I was struck with the inspiration. This is my podcast theme song. I really felt the song and I felt how it illuminated the whole essence of my podcast. And so I took a chance and reached out to the artist and his manager and they were so gracious and kind. They made it really easy.

We agreed on a contract and I uploaded that contract where necessary, believe Transistor and YouTube. And it basically says I have permission to use this song and no money needs to change hands unless my podcast becomes super successful and then we can reevaluate the contract. And what has happened is that my podcast has become moderately successful and so I have revenue sharing on YouTube. So every time

Stephanie Winn (02:22.528)
a little bit of money comes in through YouTube through my song playing in the intro and outro there, Joey Pecorero gets a little bit of money and I'm happy with that because I want him to be happy with our arrangement and I want to support this talented artist. So I have this contract and nothing has changed there, but for some reason, starting with episode 180 of my podcast, so...

More than three years in to releasing episodes every single week for some reason, Spotify's AI, which is more like a it's artificial, but it's not intelligent, started flagging episodes of my podcast for copyright infringement and saying, we will not play this in all these countries. And you can either go through this appeal process or remove the song and re upload without it.

And so I reached out to Spotify, I went through the appeals process for one of those episodes that got flagged. And I said, hey, look, I have the right to use the song. It is my podcast's theme song. It's in over 180 episodes and I will continue releasing episodes every single week. So I don't know why you're suddenly flagging this, but we need to get upstream of this issue so that I don't have this problem in the future. So that you don't remove future episodes, which I will continue releasing every week. And so that you won't root.

remove all of these episodes that came before. And Spotify, I guess the process of reviewing that is a slow process. And so they put the first episode back up after I did that, but then I reached out to support and I'm like, hey, you know, this keeps happening. I have listeners on that platform and this is my

licensed theme song, What's Going On, and Spotify support. I was assisted by someone ostensibly named Kathleen, although I'm pretty sure that whoever I was chatting with is not even in the Western world because you know how these things go. And they were of no help. They told me, are going to have to go through this process manually for every single episode. And I said,

Stephanie Winn (04:41.622)
No, you don't understand. This is my podcast's theme song. I have a license to use it. I've been using it for over three years every single week without issue. I've got over 180 episodes. How about we get upstream of this issue so you don't keep flagging and removing it and so that I don't have to submit an appeal for every single episode?" And they said, no.

And Kathleen closed the chat. Have you ever been on a chat with customer service and had them close the chat without even saying, can I help you with anything else? No, pretty rude, right? And they are making money off of me. I'm a content creator creating content for their platform. And I'm one of these people who pays my, I don't know what, 13 bucks a month to have access to Spotify. So, you know, those of us who are creating content on the platform are making money.

for the platform and they won't even give basic human decency. So I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than add one more step to my administrative process every week. Now there's already several hours of work that go into creating, scheduling and posting a podcast on several platforms every single week. That's already a lot of work. But what they're saying is that after

My podcast goes out on Spotify. Once it's flagged and removed, they want me to go through the appeals process for every episode individually from now on. All right, so let me add layers of what is messed up about the situation. There's nowhere on Spotify for creators websites to upload the document showing that I have permission to use this song. There's no way to get ahead of the issue.

And apparently other creators are having this issue too. My husband did some research for me on Reddit. Lots of people are having this issue. And Spotify has the audacity to be trying to market themselves as a podcast hosting platform. Do know what the problem is? If you host a podcast on Spotify, they won't just take your podcast down from Spotify. They will take it down from everywhere else because Spotify is your bridge to every other platform. If you choose to use

Stephanie Winn (06:57.644)
them as your podcast host. What do mean podcast host? Okay, if you don't have a podcast, you might not know what I'm talking about. So I use Transistor, it's transistor.fm. There's Anchor, there's a whole bunch of other hosting platforms. And this is basically the place that you go, that you upload your content, you know, the audio file, the show notes, the title and everything, you schedule it and the host sends that to all the other platforms.

So don't use Spotify for that. I use Transistor for that and it goes to Spotify. But Spotify is trying to make themselves a popular hosting platform. They should not be doing that. You should not be using them, by the way. If you were thinking of starting a podcast, do not use Spotify because...

If you use copyrighted content, even if you have a license to use it, they have the power to take it down, not just from Spotify, but from every other platform. Do see the problem here? So they don't have their ducks in a row. They're encouraging people to rely on Spotify for podcasting. They want podcasters to upload videos, to upload clips. They're trying to turn Spotify into social thing. They're doing all this pushing of Spotify as the go-to. And don't get me wrong, it's a good...

product in a lot of ways. I use it. listen to music on Spotify all the time and I have used it for podcasts, but this is an absolutely ridiculous system. I cannot emphasize how ridiculous it is for a platform to be pushing itself as a major podcast host and as a place that people should go to listen and not have this figured out. And I feel for the smaller podcasts than mine who are running into this issue.

I at least have somewhat of a loyal audience, so I can tell you guys, please go listen to my podcast somewhere else. Thank you so much if you've been listening on Spotify. You can get it on any other podcasting platform. It's on YouTube. You can go to sometherapist.transistor.fm. And if you go to the subscribe tab, you can find it's where my podcast is on every other platform.

Stephanie Winn (09:12.302)
And by the way, let me know in the comments where do you like to listen to podcasts because I need to start listening to them somewhere else evidently. I don't want to keep going through Spotify if I know that they're censoring people like this. So here's another part of my little public service announcement for my listeners. All of my episodes are out there. And I release new episodes every single Monday. And they're numbered. They're in order. It's a number 180 something.

when I release this. if you're going through the list and there's a number missing or several numbers missing, you know that that's a Spotify problem. That's not because that episode doesn't exist. So since Spotify won't get back to me and they're not responding to my tweets and they basically told me that this is my new problem now, if I want people to be able to listen to my podcast on Spotify, I have to add this new piece of homework to my routine. I have to go through all the

stuff I go through to get the podcast to you the normal way, then I have to get the notification that my podcast has been removed from all these different countries because of some copyright issue. Then I have to go through the appeal process every single time and give them days, maybe weeks to put my episode back out there. And then I've missed the momentum since they're telling me that that's just how they're going to do business. And they somehow think that they

are in any kind of position to be leading in the podcast industry. I'm just going to use what platform I have to say, you know, I'm not honestly going to say boycott Spotify because I use them too much myself, but I am going to say support your favorite podcasters, subscribe to them on YouTube. A lot of people are on Rumble. I don't upload my stuff to Rumble. I did for a while, but it's like a whole separate process. I upload in two places. I upload on YouTube and I upload through Transistor, which goes everywhere else, but please go somewhere else that has this sorted.

If you have any kind of contact at Spotify, if you have any way of giving them feedback, tell them how ridiculous this is. It is really, really, really ridiculous to not have this issue figured out. And if you are thinking of starting a podcast, don't use Spotify as your host. I've had good experiences with Transistor. I don't know about other hosts. There might be better hosts out there. But Spotify is not a good host as long as they're doing this to people.

Stephanie Winn (11:37.898)
So yeah, shout out to Joey Pecorero. Thank you for letting me use your song. We've never actually talked or met and we live in completely different worlds. You're a musical creative type and I'm doing this Culture War podcasting, but I really appreciate your song, your beautiful song that I've had the privilege of using on my podcast for over three years now. And that song, Half Awake, adds so much to the vibe.

and just really enhances the podcast. It would not be You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast without Half Awake by Joey Pecorero. And it's just so ridiculous that a platform that's ostensibly for music lovers doesn't want people to enjoy music on their podcasts. So go listen somewhere else. And if you like my theme song, subscribe to Joey Pecorero wherever you listen to music.

And that is all I will say for now. This is the one episode I will be releasing without the song because I want this to go through. I want this to be on Spotify and not get flagged and removed. But I have not as of yet made a decision to remove my theme song from my podcast in general. I can't imagine my podcast without it. I'm going to have to figure out another way of dealing with this issue, which is why for now I'm letting you know to go find my content somewhere else.

All right, thank you for listening. Until next week, bye.