This is sort of a followup to my previous review about them; nothing has really changed but I’ve had more encounters with their support side of things that I have a more detailed picture on what it’s like to work with them day-to-day.

Anyway, here is my comment, verbatim:

I’ve been with Symphonic since March of this year, and I currently have 19 releases managed by them (and one release each on Soundrop and CDBaby).

I’ve had plenty of support tickets with Symphonic and they usually get back to me quickly, although often the response is clearly AI-written. When that’s been insufficient I’ve been able to escalate to an actual human, though, and the answer I get is honest and straightforward, like either “thanks for the feedback” or “that’s on the roadmap” or “that’s not something we want to support” or the like.

My big complaint with Symphonic is that their metadata interface is very annoying to work with, and requires a lot of scrolling and clicking to set things like genres and individual credits. They don’t have any way of just setting the same credits for all songs on an album, and the genre selector is super annoying. I’ve given them some feedback on how it can be improved but I think it’ll be a while before any changes happen there.

I’ve also had them reject releases based on genre or title-related things (for example, they would not accept my release’s original title of “Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To” because apparently “lo-fi” and “beats” are both blacklisted due to AI slop) but they’ve been straightforward in communicating about issues like that.

They’re also a lot more strict about the cover art text requirements and, in particular, detecting text that isn’t in the release or artist name.

I’m not thrilled with their reliance on AI for customer support, and reading between the lines a bit I suspect they also use AI for developing the site itself. They’ve also raised prices and tried to justify it based on providing AI marketing tools that nobody actually wants, but I think that’s just misplaced marketing efforts to try to justify them not operating at a loss.

My main complaint is just that the UI/UX on the uploader and tagger really sucks to use with my particular set of physical disabilities and I can’t imagine it being a good experience even for people who don’t have chronic pain issues, and I wish they’d provide some sort of API-level access so that I can just script my uploads with the metadata I already have on my own end. But I can also see why they wouldn’t want to do that, since it’d make it way too easy for people to automate AI slop uploads, which they are firmly against, at least for the music and art.

They have a more detailed explanation of their stance regarding AI.

I would say that as far as mainstream distributors go, Symphonic is the least-bad of a lot of bad choices. If I had my choices I’d not be on major streaming at all, but that’s where people want to listen to me. Hopefully Fairplayer and other distributed/indie streaming options take better hold. (I’m certainly trying to do my part to make it happen!)

But anyway, in the meantime, if you do want distribution on the major DSPs, Symphonic has been pretty okay for me.

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.