TooLost (my previous top recommendation) has gotten incredibly difficult to deal with when it comes to copyright-related things. They now have a hair trigger for deciding that a song “needs documentation” regarding its legality, but won’t provide any useful information about what they think the problem is. On my most recent track they seem to think that it violates someone’s copyright but they won’t tell me whose, and apparently they’re putting the burden on me to just plain guess what their issue is, while taking a week to get back to me on every single question.

The best advice I’ve gotten from anyone is to spend a crapton more money on a copyright registration service with the hopes that it’ll convince them that I own the copyright to my own words, and even then there’s still the chance that it won’t actually help anything.

Then, for individual tracks that required licensing, I was recommending Soundrop, but they’ve raised their price and their cut, and apparently have similar support issues today.

The other distributors are just as bad. And the streaming environment is also bad.

In the past year I’ve made approximately $5 on streaming services. $5. Total. For a whole year’s worth of music.

Why should I continue to pay into a broken system that isn’t going to serve me?

Y'all can find my music on Bandcamp and Mirlo and (eventually) Subvert. And my current stuff will stay up on streaming as long as TooLost decides not to take it down after I stop paying, but I’m not going to go out of my way to put more stuff up through them.

Fuck streaming.

There are better ways.