What the fuck?To be clear, that’s hardly the only potentially offensive lyric of mine. You should hear some of the cry-baby shit I sing about. In another song I say, “you loved me like a jihadist” and I don’t even know what that means.When you’re in an indie band, there are a number of paths you can take to get your music online. You might post it directly on a service like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or YouTube. But naturally, bands want to get their music heard on as many platforms as possible, which is where services like RouteNote, or other popular ones like TuneCore, CD Baby, Awal, Distrokid, and others come in. RouteNote, unlike many of the other ones, has the advantage, particularly for a poor indie band, of being free. Others may charge anywhere from $50 to hundreds of dollars for the service, with renewal fees every year.My first reaction was that this must be a mistake of whatever algorithm RouteNote uses to scan the song’s content, like when Facebook’s censors mistake a nipple from a classic work of art for pornography. At the same time, services like Spotify and Deezer have begun to remove music that carries overt white power or neo-Nazi messages in the wake of Charlottesville, as Variety reported last summer. When I protested their denial of my protest song, they said there was nothing they could do.“Your track ‘Punch a Nazi in the Face' contains offensive/inappropriate material which Routenote deems to be unacceptable. Stores [meaning Spotify etc] state that they ‘may remove content that, in their opinion, is likely to incite hatred or discrimination of any kind, whether related to race, religion, sexuality or otherwise, or content that is deemed offensive, abusive, defamatory, illegal, pornographic or obscene in anyway’. Please remove this track from your release. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”
1.12. Cultural Sensitivities. It is the content provider’s responsibility to be knowledgeable about local regulations and cultural sensitivities. Content sold must be legal and appropriate for the countries the content is cleared. This content may be hidden using the reason: Refusal.
1.13. Nazi Propaganda. Content must not depict Nazi symbolism as restricted by the Strafgesetzbuch section 86a if the content is cleared for sale in Germany (DE), Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH), or any other country that restricts Nazi propaganda.
A spokesperson from Spotify, however, told me that they did not block the track, and likely would not have, noting that they have refused songs for racially offensive content, agreeing that this seemed weird because it was the exact opposite of that.You might say: Why not just try another service? But, like I said, many of them cost a decent amount of money, and the wait times for processing before songs actually make it to Spotify and other stores can be weeks. Our album came out a month ago, and since we timed our modest press push so it would be ready to go for people to actually hear it anywhere besides BandCamp, I don’t want to lose too much more time.If content violating this rule is submitted three times, your entire catalogue will be suspended in DE, AT, CH, and any other applicable country for up to six months.