Brandolini’s law

I’ve just experienced the power of Brandolini’s Law on myself. It is an anecdotal observation which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

What happened?

Back in 2021–2022, I was co-hosting and producing a podcast. I purchased some fitting background music before we started and have been using it in every episode.

Some distribution platforms even requested a proof of purchase when I first added the podcast there, which I, of course, provided. But not Spotify. Instead, Spotify decided to remove half of the published episodes at the beginning of this week, seemingly on a random basis. They claimed that I didn’t have permission to use the third-party music. And all that 3 years after the last published episode.

My response

In their email, they required me to answer no later than in five days. I needed to spend at least half an hour to find the proof of purchase and to write an individual response for each affected episode. And there wasn’t even an option in the form to attach the receipt.

Result

It took another 24 hours for Spotify to reinstate all episodes without asking any additional questions. Basically, they just believed my word, that I do have rights for the music. So, some of their systems just generated some bullshit allegations, and I needed to react to that in a very short timeframe to just revert everything back to how it was.

And after this, the story is over, I hope at least.

I love Spotify as an avid music listener. But as a (very) small content creator, I sometimes feel helpless, that any of the big platforms can just suspend my account for made-up reasons, and I would need to invest significant time to respond to unfunded claims just to prove that I haven’t done anything wrong.

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