It occurred once more, and the concern is it might proceed to occur extra steadily because the dystopian actuality surrounding digital music continues to deepen, and the shortage of a human ingredient to assist anybody ends in musicians having their music pulled off of streaming companies unfairly. And since unbiased artists don’t have the identical sources or representatives as main label artists, this difficulty is affecting them disproportionately.
The issue begins when an artist or band is falsely accused of paying for streams—a daft assertion if you see the cumulative spins and income a few of these bands are trying to stay on. Most actually, deep pocket artists and administration firms manipulating or paying for streams is a really major problem, ensuing within the streaming companies and distributors needing to crack down. However the usually punitive and rapid outcomes of pulling music below the suspicion of the exercise is creating collateral injury within the unbiased music house.
The most recent sufferer is the beloved unbiased nation band from North Carolina, The Piedmont Boys. When Saving Nation Music reviewed their album Virtually House in 2020, the conclusion was, “The Piedmont Boys are a pure Carolina model of Outlaw nation that honky tonk followers all world wide must be spinning.” However except you’re one of many few fortunate ones with a bodily copy of the album, it’s at the moment un-spinnable.
“We acquired the ‘Synthetic Streaming Discover’ on 8/20/2025 from TuneCore who’s our distributor,” explains Piedmont Boys frontman Greg Payne. “They pulled ‘Virtually House’ from all shops that day. It mainly mentioned that one in every of our songs ‘Boomerang’ was flagged for top ranges of synthetic streaming. Due to this fact they’re taking it down from ALL STORES. Not solely did they take that one music down however your complete album. We don’t actually promote laborious copies anymore so mainly all these songs don’t exist till we by some means get the album again up.”
One recurring theme when this difficulty arises is just not having the ability to entry any form of human to assist rectify the scenario. This was the identical difficulty underground nation artist Slackeye Slim confronted earlier this yr, who additionally used the service TuneCore to add his music. Listening to the horror tales from different artists, he pulled his catalog off of streaming preemptively after receiving quite a few notices about synthetic streams.
“Spotify and TuneCore have completely ZERO customer support besides going forwards and backwards with a robotic on a chat web page,” explains Greg Payne. “We’re pissed off to say the least and anxious that this can hold taking place to us and plenty of others if one thing is just not finished about it.”
For artists like The Piedmont Boys and Slackeye Slim, shedding their already meager streaming income is important, whereas it additionally makes it more durable to succeed in new followers.
“We work laborious to remain as related as we will in no matter scene we slot in however once they take our music off each music outlet we mainly don’t exist,” Greg Payne says. “We now have NEVER paid a dime to get extra streams. In truth, I’ve at all times taken satisfaction in the truth that all the pieces we’ve, whether or not or not it’s streams, social media likes or no matter, has been achieved 100% organically.”
One other unbiased nation artist, Cam Pierce, additionally had one in every of his albums pulled on Spotify in August. A Thousand Lonely Horses made it solely Saving Nation Music’s Greatest Albums So Far for 2025, however is at the moment all greyed out on Spotify due one other misguided declare of paid-for streams. “$potify pulled my file for completely unsubstantiated and misguided claims that I used to be utilizing AI to spice up streams,” Pierce mentioned.
Saving Nation Music has reached out to TuneCore for remark. However similar to the artists, an actual human can’t be reached. The Piedmont Boys plan on making an attempt to add the album utilizing a distinct service sooner or later.
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