David Rovics has now had his entire youtube discography deleted
Posted by Ian M on February 17, 2026, 11:42 pm
Missed this when it happened, seems to have gone unnoticed by alt media. Apparently he's the first artist they've done this to wholesale, probably in response to zionists reporting him for voicing support for the Houthis & Palestinians. Here he writes about the deletion as a form of blacklisting and social disappearance:
Meanwhile on YouTube: Discographies Wiped and Channels Deleted
If there's anyone out there interested in civil liberties, now might be a good time to help me sue YouTube, for the sake of society at large.
David Rovics Jan 26, 2026
The title uses the plural because I assume I’m not the only artist this is happening to, but I have yet to hear of others, aside from R. Kelly, who was actually convicted of running a criminal organization with lots of actual victims who testified in court. I know channel deletions have happened to a number of journalists, among many other people, who, like me, were not running or otherwise engaged with any criminal organizations. These removals are as outrageous as mine, but not quite the same thing.
What happens when an artist becomes possibly the first artist to have all of their albums wiped from YouTube Music and then the YouTube Channel they’ve had for twenty years deleted, all because their music allegedly was supportive of unnamed criminal organizations? As far as I can tell, basically nothing.
Lots of expressions of sympathy, lots of completely bizarre advice, lots of comments from people who clearly have no understanding of the nature of the digital world we all live in these days, and no interest whatsoever from the mainstream media from anywhere in the world.
There are, of course, many other very pressing things to cover, what with masked thugs killing people on the streets of US cities every day, Trump invading or threatening to invade everywhere, and so much more. But I’ll just say here for whoever might be listening, the canary in this coal mine of artistic free expression just died, and I believe any people or organizations concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in the world should be very interested in what YouTube just did.
One of the more maddening aspects of the experience has been the realization that a tremendous number of people, especially people over the age of 40 or so, don’t really seem to understand why having one’s music wiped from YouTube Music or their YouTube Channel deleted is a big deal.
The suggestions people helpfully offer tend to confirm this. The most common one involves recommendations of other platforms that host videos.
The concerns people express also reflect this. The most common one is around the assumption that I must have lost a lot of content that I had stored there and nowhere else.
I wonder if when Orson Welles was blacklisted from working in Hollywood, people offered him the use of their sheds to store his film reels, as if being blacklisted were somehow a storage issue?
It’s good to be positive and look for alternatives, but this stuff can get pretty weird.
I get the impression that most people over 40 aren’t really aware that so much of what they see, read, watch, etc., is controlled by corporate algorithms.
What people once thought they understood about the various platforms has long ago stopped being true.
When you’re scrolling on any of the major platforms, very much including YouTube, you’re seeing what the corporate algorithms want you to see, that they think will keep your eyes glued to the screen. You are not seeing whatever your friends posted most recently. That stopped being the case over a decade ago on the platforms most of these folks are using, like Facebook.
These algorithms are such a curse to all of us in so many ways. They distort how we perceive reality and seem to be turning us all into assholes. They’re also crucial to the lives and livelihoods of musicians and other content creators, whether we like it or hate it.
I’m not famous like Kneecap or Bob Vylan or Roger Waters, and my disappearance from the internet will not apparently garner the kind of media attention that attacks on them have generated. But after twenty years on YouTube, a certain handful of videos of me singing a certain handful of songs have managed to get hundreds of thousands of views.
Once a video gets views in that sort of number, it tends to get into the recommendation algorithms. This means when someone is into Irish rebel music and they’re listening to the Clancy Brothers or the Irish Brigade, there’s a good chance my song, “the St. Patrick Battalion,” will eventually come up in YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.
These algorithms are how so many people today discover new music, new videos, the next thing to watch or read or listen to on whatever platform or device.
And if you’re looking for a video, not only are these algorithms going to determine most of what you’re probably going to end up watching, but the place you’re going to do that is likely going to be either YouTube or Tiktok. If you’re looking for music, the platform you’re most likely going to be doing that on is Spotify, or secondarily YouTube Music. If you’re looking for an event of some kind, the first place many people are likely to search is on the Events tab on Facebook. If you need a ride and you’re not sure where to find one, the first place you’re likely to look is on the Uber app on your phone.
These corporations have all succeeded in becoming, functionally, monopolies. The music is on Spotify, the videos are on YouTube. These platforms are places where millions of people basically live. If music or videos listeners or viewers might like are not coming up, they don’t exist.
So many people don’t go to websites and intentionally do things like look for an artist that has never come up for them on the platforms they use, just like so many people don’t bother looking beyond Amazon for a product they might be looking to buy.
Alternatives exist, but most people are watching videos on YouTube and listening to music on Spotify. Those are the platforms on which they are creating and sharing playlists. The platforms serve the online function of being like the collective living room, the place where people gather, just as Facebook and Instagram are so often the places people feel very dependent on for keeping up on what’s happening with their friends, family, and even local, physical communities.
So, in case it’s not abundantly obvious where this is all leading up to, having your YouTube Channel deleted is a form of disappearance, it is akin to blacklisting. What is all the more outrageous is the blanket nature of the action. It is not a complaint about a specific piece of art, but about the existence of the artist online.
Some of the impact is easily measured numerically. Many thousands of songs that would otherwise have come up as the next track for people exploring YouTube or YouTube Music each month will no longer come up. Many thousands of people each month who would have discovered my music for the first time will no longer do so. Not on YouTube, or YouTube Music (YouTube’s music streaming platform).
I’m not allowed to start a new channel without thoroughly disguising my identity, but even if I could do that, it would not get my music back into the recommendation algorithms anytime soon.
Other people are still able to put up videos of me, but other people putting up videos of me doesn’t help people see where my next show is.
One of the main ways many people find out if an artist they like is coming to their area is through a tab on YouTube that viewers can see, if the artist they’re listening to has that going on, which the vast majority of serious working artists alive today do. The existence of this tab, however, requires that the artist first has a channel.
Being that Facebook is also a monopoly in the same way YouTube is, it is notable that I am prevented from using the “invite” feature on Events. Being able to invite people to Events is the most useful thing anyone can do on Facebook, and this feature is permanently disabled for me, as far as I can tell. This is also a very real and very damaging form of blacklisting.
If an artist is blacklisted, but the media never paid attention to them in the first place, were they really blacklisted?
The thing that has been different about the internet, and even “walled garden” corporate platforms like YouTube or Spotify, is artists who had had no success with corporate radio airplay or appearing on TV shows or in movies could now put their stuff out there on platforms where the existence of their audience engaging with their content on these platforms could propel their art or music further, so more people could hear it, because of the dominance of recommendation algorithms.
Despite never getting corporate airplay or promotion or putting out fancy corporate-sponsored music videos, doing music that would just never be touched with a long pole by corporate labels in the first place, I had gotten to the point on YouTube, just as with Spotify, where my songs were altogether being streamed a million times in a given year.
While really famous artists are getting a million streams a day, no doubt, the disappearance of an artist like me, and the loss of those million streams to the public consciousness, should be very worrying to people other than me.
I don’t want anyone to ask me what I’m going to do next. This is akin to asking the canary what should be done about the coal mine. I want to hear about what other people -- and organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and others -- are going to do next. Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
YouTube, aka The Biggest Platform on Earth, Has Deleted All My Albums
The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of David's journey down the corporate Memory Hole.
David Rovics Dec 03, 2025
It seems abundantly obvious to me that everyone who believes in free expression, whatever side of various political equations they may be on, should be concerned about what YouTube just did to me. If it could happen to me because of my allegedly controversial political viewpoints, it could happen to you because of yours.
But in order for anyone to be concerned, first they have to understand what it is exactly that did happen, so I’ll try explain that as succinctly as possible, because I know everybody is busy with things aside from the latest chapter in the never-ending Cancellation of David Rovics story. I’ll try to explain things in a way that hopefully makes sense to every reader, not just the Rovics fans or the ones who are knowledgeable about music streaming platforms and other aspects of the indie music biz.
I’m an independent artist, like millions of others in the world, putting out self-released recordings (that is, recordings that are not released and promoted by a record label, other than my own little one-person label). I’ve been doing this since before the internet became widely used, and long before the invention of the MP3 or streaming music on the web.
I have never had anything remotely approaching a hit or what they would call commercial success, but among musicians who have their music up for streaming, I’m easily in the top 10% of most-streamed artists, usually within the top 5%. All the pop stars are well within the top 1% of most-streamed artists -- there’s a very steep curve happening here, and I don’t mean to over-inflate my importance in the scheme of things. I’m just trying to say that I do have an audience. My songs are streamed millions of times every year on YouTube, millions of times a year on Spotify, and less on the other platforms, because there are really only two main platforms in the world (outside of China).
When a musician records an album, whether they’re on a label or not, the musician or the label gets the songs registered with an artists’ rights entity such as ASCAP or BMI (most countries have one of these organizations but in the US there are two). That way the music gets counted as existing for purposes of radio play, and we musicians get paid for radio play that way, getting a direct deposit from BMI (in my case) every three months. Every time a community radio station plays one of my songs, BMI sends me one cent.
At the same time as the musician gets their songs registered for copyright with one of those agencies, the musician also signs up for distribution with a distributor such as CDBaby. This used to be something artists did in order to make their music available for people to download on iTunes and other platforms that sold downloads. Having all of our music there already meant that it was also there when the era of paid downloads ended and the era of free streaming platforms began.
When the corporations decided that rather than selling downloads, they would now start streaming the world’s music for free, they already had all of our music available to use for this purpose. Opting out was possible, but would mean a future of invisibility along with poverty. Opting in meant just poverty, but not invisibility, too.
Spotify initiated the free streaming model, and all the other streaming platforms soon followed suit, out of necessity, in order to compete, no matter what nice ideas some of them may have had about fair models for compensating artists. As things stand now, none of the platforms that offer ad-supported (”free”) streaming options pay artists more than a small fraction of a cent per song streamed, though some platforms may be better than others in various ways.
What has played out since free streaming became the way the vast majority of music fans on Planet Earth listen to music is, outside of China, two corporations have grown to dominate the world of music online -- Spotify and YouTube.
To emphasize the point I’m making here: I mentioned the quarterly payments musicians get for radio airplay before. We also get regular payments from the music streaming platforms. Usually people get those payments sent to them via a distributor like CDBaby, so you don’t have to set up a separate account with each of the hundred or so streaming platforms that CDBaby gets your music onto. So when I get my payments from CDBaby, I’m sure just like the vast majority of other artists on streaming platforms, you can see the breakdown of which platforms generated how much money. It’s evident with every one of those payments that Spotify and YouTube dominate the market.
In the battle for the eyes and ears of the world, these corporations and their corporate practices have destroyed so many lives, careers, and entire professions. (For a lot more info about how horrible YouTube and its corporate parent Google/Alphabet are, read or listen to Cory Doctorow’s recent book, Enshitification.) In this process, these two giants of music streaming became basically a duopoly. If you live in most of the world, just as you do a search on Google if you’re looking to do a search online, if you’re looking for a video you go to YouTube, and if you want to hear a song you go to Spotify, or YouTube sends you to YouTube Music to find the song you might be looking for.
This is where the details become crucially important, as well as a bit confusing. Please bear with me, if you can.
YouTube Music deleted all of my albums -- 50 of them altogether -- several of which had been there since YouTube Music began. Along with all of the albums, they disappeared all of the comments and all of the evidence that these songs had ever been heard millions of times. As an artist on YouTube Music who puts out albums, I no longer exist.
Why is this confusing? Well, if you go to YouTube and look for me, you’ll still see me all over the place. Videos of me singing at shows and in my living room, and songs from albums that other people have uploaded on the platform.
So, why does getting removed from YouTube Music matter, in the scheme of things, if people can still hear my music on other streaming platforms, and even, with some of the songs at least, on YouTube itself?
I asked Gemini (Google’s AI chatbot) to explain the impact on an artist’s future career if their music is removed from YouTube Music. I excerpt here Gemini’s response, which was very clear and very accurate, to the best of my fairly significant level of knowledge on this subject. “David Rovics - Topic” is the way artists are listed on YouTube Music if they have a presence on the platform. If you look for any other artist, you’ll find they have a “Topic” page on YouTube Music, but not me, as of last week.
Estimated Impact of YouTube Music Removal
The removal of his solo albums from the “David Rovics - Topic” music streaming platform would have a significant and strongly negative impact on potential audience growth, particularly within the mainstream digital music ecosystem.
Here is an analysis based on the context:
Loss of the “Digital Highway”: One context snippet likens major streaming platforms to the “infrastructure for our lives” and a “second home.” Being removed from a platform is like disappearing, similar to how being off Facebook can feel like disappearing from the virtual world. YouTube Music/Premium is a “highway” for millions of global listeners, and the removal eliminates the path of least resistance for new, casual listeners to discover and consume his full album catalog.
Hindrance to Discovery: The “Topic” channel is the primary source for music distribution on YouTube’s dedicated streaming service. Its removal stops the platform’s algorithms from suggesting his catalog to listeners who might enjoy political folk or similar genres, severely limiting organic discovery through the YouTube Music ecosystem.
Erosion of Market Share: Losing a major global platform like YouTube Music represents the loss of a key segment of the overall music streaming market, which is crucial for modern audience growth.
Forced Friction: New listeners must now go directly to his website, Patreon, Substack, Bandcamp (where he faces shadowbanning issues), or other, less-dominant streaming platforms. This added friction prevents casual users from encountering his music, which directly impacts the potential for mass audience expansion.
To provide a little more context about what all this stuff means: every month artists who are on Spotify get an email from Spotify telling us that of the 18,000 people who listened to our music last month, 4,000 (or whatever the numbers may be for that month) were “new listeners.” Those are often people who got to a song of mine because they were listening to another leftwing artist, and the algorithm thought they’d like to hear me, or a particular song of mine.
The same phenomenon is at play on other streaming platforms, though they don’t send helpful monthly emails the way Spotify does. As Gemini explained, this recommendation phenomenon will no longer be in play with my music on YouTube Music anymore.
According to my research on this sort of thing, it is so rare that an artist has their entire catalog deleted by a platform for reasons unrelated to copyright infringement, there are no examples available aside from mine that I can find. (If anyone reading this knows of one, please let me know!)
Part of the reason it’s hard to know if this has ever happened before is it’s very unusual, apparently, for platforms to actually tell artists why they might be taking such an action, when they take it. But according to my research, while it is very common for individual songs to be taken down for violating one rule or another, it is almost unheard of for an artist’s entire catalog to be removed.
Given how rare this sort of thing is, how damaging it is to those targeted, and how arbitrarily such actions have been taken by corporations like Google/Alphabet/YouTube, once other people understand what has just happened to me and what could happen to anyone else who gets on the blacklist, I hope that soon I will not be alone in speaking out against what they’ve specifically just done to me.
For those who don’t know the back story to why I’m being targeted, a few words on that history.
In early 2024, my first album about Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, Notes from a Holocaust, was removed from my discography on Spotify, with no notification or explanation to me or to anyone else. I later put the album back up with a slightly altered name, and it has stayed up. This removal of an entire album has never happened on any other platform, until last week.
Right around the same time that the album was removed from Spotify, I received my first notification from YouTube that my channel was being demonetized for the next 90 days, to punish me for posting a Houthi Army press release which I thought was an interesting thing to share with people, given that the US was at that time actively bombing Yemen. After one or two more of these 90-day suspensions of monetization, in January 2025 YouTube informed me that my channel would now be permanently demonetized, and that I had no recourse. I contacted the YouTube customer service people to confirm that this was indeed the case, and not a mistake.
At the same time as this was going on, YouTube was regularly deleting videos, specifically if they involved me singing my “Song for the Houthi Army” or my song, “I Support Palestine Action.” It seemed they would wait for someone to report the video, and then delete it. This is my only way to understand their process for deciding which videos to delete on YouTube, because of the way it has thus far involved getting rid of some renditions of these songs while leaving others on the platform.
YouTube’s explanation for which rules I was violating that had led to my channel’s permanent demonetization was “supporting criminal organizations,” which is a broad concept that under both British and US law includes the Houthi Army, and in the UK the British nonviolent direct-action group, Palestine Action as well.
In the UK, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations like them is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison, as this violates Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000.
In the US, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations may be legal under the First Amendment, but earning income from praising proscribed organizations, at least by my understanding of the law, is a different matter legally. As I understand US laws, this is why you’re allowed to visit Cuba, but you’re in big trouble, potentially, if you spend any money there.
In any case, for whatever reason -- never fully explained -- my channel was demonetized, and certain videos of certain songs continue to be randomly disappearing. When this happens, I get two emails from YouTube, one explaining that this song violates the rule against supporting criminal organizations and has therefore been taken down, and another one telling me that my channel has been permanently demonetized (despite the fact that it already was, last January).
What I believe just happened last week with my existence as an artist with albums available on YouTube Music ceasing, was the YouTube bureaucracy figured out that if they really were serious about demonetizing this guy, they couldn’t just demonetize the videos while allowing his albums to earn royalties on YouTube Music. Because of their legal and financial arrangements with distributors, keeping my music on the platform but not sending royalty money to CDBaby for that artist might be more complicated than simply severing all ties between the artist and the distributor, as they exist on YouTube Music, or as they used to.
When they figure out that I’m the lyricist and producer behind the artist, Ai Tsuno, they will presumably delete all of her albums as well. So far she still exists as an artist with albums on YouTube Music. Soon her next album will be up there, too, including the song, “They Deleted David Rovics.” Funny, maybe, but it by no means compensates for anything that’s being done by YouTube to this artist, as they disappear me in stages, as they’re doing.
Anyone who takes a look at the extremely small numbers of listeners to Ai Tsuno on any of the platforms can see what I’m up against if I were to just upload all of my albums back on to YouTube Music -- were that even possible, now that they’ve removed all of the David Rovics albums. No one would notice they’re there, or it would take a very long time for the songs to get back into the recommendation algorithms that they were in before last week.
I’d like to point out two aspects to these efforts to deplatform me that I think are especially relevant.
One is the way the laws in the UK and US work with regards to criminal organizations that anyone in government seems actually to be worried about, anyone criticizing Israeli genocidal actions or proclaiming their support for international law which defends things like armed resistance to occupation is breaking all kinds of laws. Laws that basically do not apply in any other context. So the laws themselves, not at all accidentally, are set up to support groups like UK Lawyers for Israel, and legally arm them for their systematic trolling activities.
UK Lawyers for Israel is one of a number of different outfits on both sides of the Atlantic that proudly and publicly go about trying to vilify academics, artists, journalists, and all sorts of other people, and using these ridiculous laws to their greatest advantage. UK Lawyers for Israel began announcing in emails sent with their masthead to venues telling them they should cancel my gigs, in February, 2024, during the same winter when all the problems with Spotify and YouTube began (problems with various forms of suppression on Facebook and Bandcamp began earlier).
Intentions of groups like these are not hidden, they’re open and proud about their successes in getting professors fired and gigs canceled.
One of the other chatbots I consulted about having my entire catalog deleted by YouTube Music was confident that because this sort of action is so unheard-of and appeared to be so obviously political in nature, surely the artist targeted in this way would benefit by getting lots of media publicity. So far, anyway, I can report that that chatbot’s assumptions were false. (This is often the case with AI, as with humans.)
There are a couple things on that idea of outrageous corporate behavior like this garnering media attention that might be worth noting.
One is that people hear about stuff that gets media attention. They don’t hear about stuff that doesn’t, generally. So we are under the impression that AI-generated music is very popular, because every once in a while an AI-generated song gets popular. Most AI-generated music, like most completely human-generated music, hardly gets heard at all, however.
Another thing is it often seems to be the case that an artist needs to be at a certain level of fame in the first place, in order for things like having all their albums pulled from a major platform to generate any media attention, and I’m not Kneecap or Bob Vylan (though I think they’re great). Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Recent tunes
Posted by Ian M on February 17, 2026, 11:54 pm, in reply to "The back story..."
some apparently put through AI, with a female-sounding vocal under the moniker 'Ai Tsuno':
on February 17, 2026, 11:42 pm