Like many new artists, trying to build an audience can be a long game, through multiple methods. One of which is - how do you get your music in front of people that might like it within a platform like Spotify?

Doing a little research, it's a dodgy game - so many 'playlist curators', some great and do a great job and some that are bot farms. There's sites that work with curators to try to get your music to the ones that would be a fit - kind of a broker.

With my first two releases, I'd worked with a reputable PR company that did this the good way and got some great results. As these campaigns ended, I looked at options I'd found through research that appeared well reviewed and didn't promise the Earth - after all, I'm after actual people listening, not over-inflated listener numbers that don't mean anything!

The numbers of playlist adds and listens were nicely low-key, in the 100's, which felt legit...but...later on found that too high a percentage of these moderate amount of listens were flagged as potentially fake by Spotify. The distribution site I use, absolutely would want to preserve their reputation, has a zero-tolerance policy and issued takedown orders for these tracks across all platforms.

Perhaps I was naive in trying out any of these platforms that might help with promotion - the upshot was a modest about of listens. I followed up with the distributor and Spotify to see if there's a conversation to be had around what happened and how to avoid in future. Spotify deferred to the distributor and they refused to engage in a conversation about it.

This means a very disappointing outcome of these tracks not being made available through this distributor again to any platform and I have no data about what playlists or broker may be responsible.

So I hold my hands up to naivety and certainly wasn't up for fake listens of any kind but damn...no further information or any kind of appeal...just gone forever seems overly harsh in an already difficult environment!