Complaints

• Initial Complaint

  06/03/2024

  Complaint Type:

  Service or Repair Issues

  Status:

  Resolved

  More info

  We are a music distributor. We use revelator to share the work of 3000 Musicians to the stores ********* ********* Therefor we need a provider like Revelator.We partnered with them for a year now.So far all was good, except they kept around ****** of artists royalties because some artists couldnt provide a license. You need to know that the stores like spotify pay out money on a monthly base but the first time after 3 months. So the first time monye gets in, revelator tells us, there is something wrong and keeps the money. They do not tell you the first month or immidiatly.When we contacted them, what happens to the money, we got no answer. After a while we had a few people on our plattform trying to steal money from the music industry by doing fake streams. We immidiatly bann them once we know that. To find out, you need the Artificial streaming report. Spotify sends this out every month. In this report there were 450 songs from us, which were attributed to 6 of our users. After further examination, there were 3 people, two of them with two accounts each.This month, however, we first received an email from Revelator telling us that they were deleting all our releases from spotify! This is the worst thing that can happen to a music label. This was on the 30.05.2024.We pay 1300 per month to revelator, they keep an average of 8-****** musician income, then keep another %. And instead of warning us that we can take action, they delete everything straight away. We spent 5000$ a month for ****** ads and meta ads to get the people on our website. Now we allready lost a huge ammount of musicians and the ****** ads where useless.Thats a loss of more then 100.000$. We emailed revelator daily now but we do not get any answers. They ghosting us. They didn't give us any help to fix this. In fact they charged the monthly 1300 a week befor again. Every hour we are loosing more and more musicians. We can't find a new partner that fast!

  Business response

  06/11/2024

  Dear ***,

  This complaint comes as a surprise. As far as I know we have been in contact with you and your team, and we have responded to your various emails and support tickets within the *** timeframe for your account type. It is indeed the case that our team initially misunderstood that your account termination was not immediate and that this may have caused a delay in responding to you, but I have since notified the team that you have indeed been granted until the end of June to offboard and that your requests should be handled as usual.

  The last email I personally received from you was "Thank you" for accepting to redistribute Skaida Music's content to Spotify.

  As for your other points:

  As I've already written to you, it is with regret that we have had to terminate your account and take the drastic step of taking down all your content from Spotify. As I've explained, based on Spotify's reporting your account stands to incur a penalty of over ***** Euros due to Spotify's new artificial streaming policy, and potentially double that since Spotify's artificial streaming reporting schedule is delayed by nearly 2 months. Given that this amount exceeds your royalties and further represents significant damage to our standing with Spotify and therefore our entire business we have had no choice but to take down your entire catalog from Spotify. The decision to take down your entire catalog and not just the infringing tracks is because it is extremely difficult to identify which tracks may result in artificial streaming before the fact. Lastly, as you know, we did offer to reinstate those tracks for which you had absolute certainty that they were from trustworthy sources who would not engage in artificial streaming, and you did take us up on this and we did redeliver those tracks to Spotify within hours of your request.

  As for the termination of your account and withholding of royalties generated through rights infringement and violations of the music service's (DSPs) Terms of Use, please refer to your contract's Exhibit D, paragraph 6 "Anti-Fraud Compliance Policy", and the BBB can read at ********************************************************

  Although we are held to issue 2 warnings before terminating an account, in your case we have given you MANY more warnings: I count at least 10

  We have further remarked multiple times that you are not respecting your agreement to thoroughly inspect the content you distribute to ensure that it does not constitute a rights violation and complies with the DSPs TOS; despite these notices we continued to see you approve content that ACRcloud identified as belonging to 3rd parties.

  Withholding of fraudulent royalties is not only a standard in our industry, but in many cases it is a legal requirement as we are due to disburse these royalties to the legitimate rights holder.

  The reason that some royalties are identified as infringing only after they are distributed is because we trust you to perform KYC on your clients and thoroughly review their content before approving it for distribution. When you do not do so, we are left to identify such infringement when we generate your royalty statements, which given the DSPs' reporting schedule means 2-3 months after the content was distributed. Revelator is not unique in proceeding in this fashion; this is the norm in our industry as we aim to discourage bad actors from trying their luck again if all they stand to lose is only to have their garbage content taken down without also having their royalties withheld.

  Lastly I would like to point out that we are an established and recognized business in the music industry and not a scam operator as you believe:

  We have been a member of Merlin for over 8 years (Merlin is the coalition of independent accounting for the 4 largest market share in the music industry after the 3 majors), and members of our team regularly serve on ************** of ***************** We are a founding member of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance which regroups all the major independent distributors, as well as notable DSPs such as Spotify and Amazon. 

  If you have any further grievances or requests, you are welcome to email us.

  All the best

  Customer response

  06/11/2024

   
  Better Business Bureau:
  
  I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to my concern, and find that this resolution is satisfactory to me.
  
  min the meantime we were in contact with revelator and yoktan. We made the complaint because we didnt hear back from them for 3 days. 
  

  thanks 

  
  

*Some consumers may elect to not publish the details of their complaints, some complaints may not meet BBB's standards for publication, or BBB may display a portion of complaints when a high volume is received for a particular business. ↩