No More Robbery!

Hello again friends! 

Yes, I know, it’s been a while. But life has been life-ing & I’ve been taking some time to just relax & enjoy it all (well, most of it, anyways). 

I’m dropping in here to leave you all a little note about why you are going to have problems finding my music online in the very near future. 

To put it bluntly, streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) are stealing from artists. I’ve never been ok with any kind of theft, & I am certainly not ok with some tech giant stealing from me & my musician friends. 

You may, or may not, be aware that while you, the listener, pay a monthly fee to these services, when you listen to the music, a very, very tiny portion of that subscription fee is actually going to pay your favorite artists. For Spotify, the payout to artists is $0.003 per stream. Yes. You read that right, less than half a penny. Apple is a bit better, but not much. I could go on & on & list all the ridiculously small payout amounts, but I think you get the drift. At those rates it takes well over 100 streams just to make a single dollar! 

On top of the non-existent pay from streaming, most streaming platforms have updated their Terms of Service (TOS) for artists to include clauses about Artificial Intelligence. Spotify, in particular, just last night, updated their TOS to say that if you have uploaded music to the platform, it can be used by the platform to “remix” or “sample” the song. These new TOS also include language that states that these “remixes” or “samples” will not be eligible for payouts to the original artist & that there will be no way to file a copyright claim. 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t care to have my work used for purposes that I didn’t intend. Nor do I care to give pieces of my lyrics, my voice or anything that took me a lifetime to create away for free! Taking my work without my knowledge, reusing it for something I did not approve of & then disallowing me to claim it as my own, & to get paid for it IS THEFT. Pure & simple. 

So, today, I filed claims with all streaming platforms asking for my music to be removed. 

I am working on a solution to get my music back out online & that will be forthcoming, but it takes time. And know, that if you want anything I’ve created, you can always come HERE, to the website & find it. Going forward THIS WEBSITE will be the place you can find all things “Lauren Mitchell”, now & in the future.

In the meantime … you can certainly go to my YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/@LaurenMitchellMusic-c ) and check out all of the videos I have made for you over the years! There are a few new ones up there too! 

Yes, I’ll still be on social media from time to time, but those places aren’t friendly to artists either, for other reasons, which I won’t go into now. If you’d like to connect with me in, what I believe to be a more meaningful way, you can check out some of my writing on Substack at @AngryArtistRevolution ( https://substack.com/@angryartistrevolution/posts ). And if you like what you read, hit the Subscribe button, please.  It’s free unless you choose to become a paid subscriber, but that’s up to you. Nothing there is behind a paywall. 

I’m hoping all of my friends, fans, & longtime Believers understand that I’m making these moves to ensure that my work is protected in the long run. I want you all to have access to everything I create, but I also want to make sure I, & other artists, are compensated fairly for our work. No one should work for free, in any profession … & that includes musicians. 

I’ll share an update in the coming weeks, once I’ve got my music back online & hope you’ll decide to join me wherever I end up! It wouldn’t be the same without ya! 

PS … there IS another album in the works …. But that’s a story for another time. 

Stay Tuned …………. 

And, as always, many thanks for your continued support, 

~ Lauren