I used to earn a royalty for every stream of my music on YouTube. But then, around last June, something changed; I stopped getting paid for over half of my music's streams. I recently contacted my digital distributor for an explanation, but they never replied. Over the following month, I sent them two reminders to reply and opened a second support ticket, but I never heard from them.

My distributor's reluctance to address the issue has given me cause for concern. Profits seem to be getting skimmed out of my pocket which is a serious breach of ethics, so I'm going to start pulling my music off the service. As soon as I can make it happen, my 2016 album The Holidays in Music, and my 2018 album Positively Polka, will be deleted from YouTube.

UPDATE March 9:

Both albums have been succesfully removed from YouTube. I am thinking about eventually removing the rest of my music from the service as well, but that leaves me in between a rock and hard place. YouTube is the world's biggest platform for music — if you have an album or single out, people expect to find it on YouTube. By taking my music off YouTube, I'll stop YouTube from taking advantage of me, but it will also make my music less discoverable.

Later this spring, I will be digitally distributing my 2022 album, Escape to Polka Paradise. It will be distributed to all the major platforms except YouTube, iHeart Radio, and TikTok. [The reason I no longer distribute my music to iHeart Radio is explained in this article. TikTok employs a non-standard model of paying streaming royalties which also takes advantage of artists.]