Meanwhile on YouTube: Discographies Wiped and Channels Deleted

If there's anyone out there interested in civil liberties, now might be a good time to help me sue YouTube, for the sake of society at large.

The title uses the plural because I assume I’m not the only artist this is happening to, but I have yet to hear of others, aside from R. Kelly, who was actually convicted of running a criminal organization with lots of actual victims who testified in court. I know channel deletions have happened to a number of journalists, among many other people, who, like me, were not running or otherwise engaged with any criminal organizations. These removals are as outrageous as mine, but not quite the same thing.

What happens when an artist becomes possibly the first artist to have all of their albums wiped from YouTube Music and then the YouTube Channel they’ve had for twenty years deleted, all because their music allegedly was supportive of unnamed criminal organizations? As far as I can tell, basically nothing.

Lots of expressions of sympathy, lots of completely bizarre advice, lots of comments from people who clearly have no understanding of the nature of the digital world we all live in these days, and no interest whatsoever from the mainstream media from anywhere in the world.

There are, of course, many other very pressing things to cover, what with masked thugs killing people on the streets of US cities every day, Trump invading or threatening to invade everywhere, and so much more. But I’ll just say here for whoever might be listening, the canary in this coal mine of artistic free expression just died, and I believe any people or organizations concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in the world should be very interested in what YouTube just did.

One of the more maddening aspects of the experience has been the realization that a tremendous number of people, especially people over the age of 40 or so, don’t really seem to understand why having one’s music wiped from YouTube Music or their YouTube Channel deleted is a big deal.

The suggestions people helpfully offer tend to confirm this. The most common one involves recommendations of other platforms that host videos.

The concerns people express also reflect this. The most common one is around the assumption that I must have lost a lot of content that I had stored there and nowhere else.

I wonder if when Orson Welles was blacklisted from working in Hollywood, people offered him the use of their sheds to store his film reels, as if being blacklisted were somehow a storage issue?

It’s good to be positive and look for alternatives, but this stuff can get pretty weird.

I get the impression that most people over 40 aren’t really aware that so much of what they see, read, watch, etc., is controlled by corporate algorithms.

What people once thought they understood about the various platforms has long ago stopped being true.

When you’re scrolling on any of the major platforms, very much including YouTube, you’re seeing what the corporate algorithms want you to see, that they think will keep your eyes glued to the screen. You are not seeing whatever your friends posted most recently. That stopped being the case over a decade ago on the platforms most of these folks are using, like Facebook.

These algorithms are such a curse to all of us in so many ways. They distort how we perceive reality and seem to be turning us all into assholes. They’re also crucial to the lives and livelihoods of musicians and other content creators, whether we like it or hate it.

I’m not famous like Kneecap or Bob Vylan or Roger Waters, and my disappearance from the internet will not apparently garner the kind of media attention that attacks on them have generated. But after twenty years on YouTube, a certain handful of videos of me singing a certain handful of songs have managed to get hundreds of thousands of views.

Once a video gets views in that sort of number, it tends to get into the recommendation algorithms. This means when someone is into Irish rebel music and they’re listening to the Clancy Brothers or the Irish Brigade, there’s a good chance my song, “the St. Patrick Battalion,” will eventually come up in YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.

These algorithms are how so many people today discover new music, new videos, the next thing to watch or read or listen to on whatever platform or device.

And if you’re looking for a video, not only are these algorithms going to determine most of what you’re probably going to end up watching, but the place you’re going to do that is likely going to be either YouTube or Tiktok. If you’re looking for music, the platform you’re most likely going to be doing that on is Spotify, or secondarily YouTube Music. If you’re looking for an event of some kind, the first place many people are likely to search is on the Events tab on Facebook. If you need a ride and you’re not sure where to find one, the first place you’re likely to look is on the Uber app on your phone.

These corporations have all succeeded in becoming, functionally, monopolies. The music is on Spotify, the videos are on YouTube. These platforms are places where millions of people basically live. If music or videos listeners or viewers might like are not coming up, they don’t exist.

So many people don’t go to websites and intentionally do things like look for an artist that has never come up for them on the platforms they use, just like so many people don’t bother looking beyond Amazon for a product they might be looking to buy.

Alternatives exist, but most people are watching videos on YouTube and listening to music on Spotify. Those are the platforms on which they are creating and sharing playlists. The platforms serve the online function of being like the collective living room, the place where people gather, just as Facebook and Instagram are so often the places people feel very dependent on for keeping up on what’s happening with their friends, family, and even local, physical communities.

So, in case it’s not abundantly obvious where this is all leading up to, having your YouTube Channel deleted is a form of disappearance, it is akin to blacklisting. What is all the more outrageous is the blanket nature of the action. It is not a complaint about a specific piece of art, but about the existence of the artist online.

Some of the impact is easily measured numerically. Many thousands of songs that would otherwise have come up as the next track for people exploring YouTube or YouTube Music each month will no longer come up. Many thousands of people each month who would have discovered my music for the first time will no longer do so. Not on YouTube, or YouTube Music (YouTube’s music streaming platform).

I’m not allowed to start a new channel without thoroughly disguising my identity, but even if I could do that, it would not get my music back into the recommendation algorithms anytime soon.

Other people are still able to put up videos of me, but other people putting up videos of me doesn’t help people see where my next show is.

One of the main ways many people find out if an artist they like is coming to their area is through a tab on YouTube that viewers can see, if the artist they’re listening to has that going on, which the vast majority of serious working artists alive today do. The existence of this tab, however, requires that the artist first has a channel.

Being that Facebook is also a monopoly in the same way YouTube is, it is notable that I am prevented from using the “invite” feature on Events. Being able to invite people to Events is the most useful thing anyone can do on Facebook, and this feature is permanently disabled for me, as far as I can tell. This is also a very real and very damaging form of blacklisting.

If an artist is blacklisted, but the media never paid attention to them in the first place, were they really blacklisted?

The thing that has been different about the internet, and even “walled garden” corporate platforms like YouTube or Spotify, is artists who had had no success with corporate radio airplay or appearing on TV shows or in movies could now put their stuff out there on platforms where the existence of their audience engaging with their content on these platforms could propel their art or music further, so more people could hear it, because of the dominance of recommendation algorithms.

Despite never getting corporate airplay or promotion or putting out fancy corporate-sponsored music videos, doing music that would just never be touched with a long pole by corporate labels in the first place, I had gotten to the point on YouTube, just as with Spotify, where my songs were altogether being streamed a million times in a given year.

While really famous artists are getting a million streams a day, no doubt, the disappearance of an artist like me, and the loss of those million streams to the public consciousness, should be very worrying to people other than me.

I don’t want anyone to ask me what I’m going to do next. This is akin to asking the canary what should be done about the coal mine. I want to hear about what other people -- and organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and others -- are going to do next.

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