Streaming services playing art police
I've been doing a ton of genre-dipping with my current musical project, sorority hamster, as I try to figure out my voice. In doing so, I've ventured deep into the hyper niche of grindcore / cybergrind.
By definition, grindcore songs are short. Like, really fucking short, typically only lasting seconds. As a buddy of mine commented recently:
It's like the entire pot of coffee all at once.
To fit the aesthetic, I put together a track that clocks in at a mere 32 seconds in length.
As I've been attempting to move fast and make noise, I knocked out an album cover on my phone and scheduled a release of my latest single.
Ship it, onto the next track... or so I thought.
Streaming services are opinionated
A day later, I received an email from DistroKid, advising me that my "art" isn't sufficient enough to release to the world:
Stores will not accept albums which the average song length is less than 60 seconds, therefore we are unable to approve this title. If you have longer songs that you can add to the album, that will make the average song length longer than 60 seconds, that may help.
Keep in mind, this isn't a critique of DistroKid, as I'm sure this is an upstream policy that they are stuck enforcing.
Let's unpack this a bit. Say you're a grindcore band that's just finished up recording your debut LP. It's 10 songs, with deep lyrics and a heavy investment in the overall production.
But the average track length is only 45 seconds.
The streaming services are like "lol nope, your art... isn't".
These are the same streaming services that are actively engaged in payola lawsuits. The ones potentially pushing AI generated music to avoid paying royalties out to human beings putting themselves out there with their art.
Makes for a strong case to sell direct to your listeners via Bandcamp, or even venturing into physical releases.
Getting around the art police's speed limit
Turns out the 60 second average track length isn't quite accurate. Best as I can tell, the penalty is actually related to full albums, in this case a single, being less than a minute in length.
In an attempt to get around the limit, I called upon one of my least favorite musical trends, the slowed and reverbed track. I took my 267 BPM track and slowed it down to a mere 112 BPM. Slapped on another layer of reverb and called it a day.
The new track is 1 minute and 17 seconds, helping to push the entire album length to over a minute. The average track length was shy of a minute, 54.5 seconds to be exact.
I like to solve problems, and solving them with a bit of irony is always nice. This new single for my song 67xB4 (sixty-seven times before), complete with the slowed down B-side, was accepted and released on major streaming services.
Now if I could just figure out how to get more folks to listen to my trash pop.