*Spotify Show Removal: How Spotify shut down this podcast due to a big book publisher AI DMCA takedown

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tracie Hazzard, and along with my co host, Tom Tazzard, we are going to talk about the DMC takedown example we came across happened to one of our clients in the last couple of weeks. Can Spotify really shut down your podcast? The answer will surprise you.

Yeah. So I'm going to share a little bit of the story and I'm even going to share what the podcast is. The podcaster won't mind and actually want to give her show a little love here and hopefully get more people to be aware of it, because the show was taken down by Spotify without notice, just immediately taken down when another company, in this case, put in a complaint to Spotify about copyright.

So here's what I want to, like, really make sure we lay the groundwork here, Tom, is that we have seen a lot of takedowns of episodes. Happens all the time on YouTube. Happens often on Spotify. Usually it's a music issue. You rectify the music issue and it goes back up. It's not taking down your entire show, but we're talking about a takedown of an entire show. How many episodes were in this?

More than 300.

And a lot of followers, too. On Spotify.

Yeah, absolutely. And here's the thing that we even have experienced a lot of claims of copyright for our podcasters with music. Yes, Tracy, most often on YouTube and on Spotify, those two platforms, we're seeing this happen the most. But even when there's a complaint about a music copyright, most of the time they don't even take down the episode. The video on YouTube or the podcast. It can happen, but they usually are putting a red flag on it and saying, hey, there's been a claim made on the music. Do you have a license for this? And if you provide it, that satisfies the inquiry and it goes away. And if you don't, then. Or you don't respond fast enough, that's when they may take down the episode. But they wouldn't take down the whole show unless the music is in every episode. If it's something you use maybe in your prerecorded intro of your show and. And it is on every episode.

Well, we should start out also by clarifying what DMCA is.

That's true. So that's the law that was passed. Yeah, go ahead.

It was passed in 1998, so it's pretty old. I mean, I think we started our first digital business in 1998. So. Yeah, so that's really old. It's the Digital Millennium Copyright act and it creates a safe harbor for online service providers like Spotify. Right. And it makes it so that they can't be sued. They just have to do this takedown. It requires them to remove the infringing content and it basically makes it so that there's no blame.

Well, here's the thing. Internet 1.0, late 90s, there are all these platforms, especially social media platforms, that's really. It was created there for. With the concern of them first and then because podcasts, guess what didn't even exist in 1998. Right? They didn't. First ones were not until we got into the early 2000s and the iPod actually was created. And you know, remember that when the ipod was just an ipod and it wasn't a phone. Right. So okay, so it's going back a ways but you definitely this was a situation where all these platforms were under attack for content that was user generated content. YouTube obviously is one of the early entrants in. Well actually they were even in the early 2000s, but you had all these different platforms. MySpace and eventually Facebook wasn't even until 2000s. But there were problems where the platforms were under attack. The platforms like, wait a second, this is user generated content. Don't shoot the messenger. We're how the content is getting delivered to people out there on the Internet. We're not the ones creating the content, so don't attack us. And so there was this know legislation passed and I actually think there are a lot of good reasons why that was passed. However, today we're going to share this, the details of this situation. That really shows how unfortunately platforms like Spotify use that law as a shield not only.

Or a bludgeon.

Sued. Yeah. Not only did not be sued, but to say, you know what, I'm not going to be the arbiter of this. You guys that are unhappy with each other or you know, one unhappy with the other, you guys that are involved in this, go work it out amongst yourselves. Until then, we're taking the show down because we don't want to be to blame.

But the real problem here, Tom, is that it's not like there was a dispute in place. This podcaster never heard from anybody that there was a problem.

Correct. So let me now sort of set the table. The show is called Women Leaders on the Move. It's a podcast that's been with us for many years, more than 300 episodes and it is a podcast that is celebrating women in business, helping them amplify awareness of what they're doing, and they're providing a great service for listeners to learn from other women business leaders. And it's run by a woman who has a whole platform called her C Suite that is, you know, really has a mission for serving women in business. And what a wonderful thing. And this show interviewed all sorts of different. Different people over the years. And by the way, the episode that was in question was published in, like, 2019 or something, or 2020. It was easily more than five years ago. And it was an author that she interviewed about a book, and this book was published.

So I've been on the show, by the way.

Oh, yeah, that's right. You have been. So here's the thing. What we learned happened. Well, one morning, all of a sudden, this customer reached out to me and said, hey, Tom, my podcast is down off Spotify. Can you help look into that? And. Sure, look into it. It was down, wasn't there? Well, then she got an email from Spotify that basically told her, hey, there's been a copyright claim made against your podcast. And here's the other party, here's their info. You can either go to this form on our website and provide all the information and submit why you think it's wrong. Although Spotify wasn't really going to do anything with that unless it was just completely wrong. Like, they got the wrong show. There was some major thing. It's kind of like, you know, you get a. You. Somebody you know arrests you for a crime that occurred in Los Angeles, and you can prove you were in New York on that day. Right. I mean, if it's just so far apart and it's obviously a mistake, they might fix it. But if it's there anything while they say this and I say this, they're like, work it out between the two of you. So they provide all that information. And she didn't know how to address this, so she reached out to us. Apartheidize. And I'm interested in this stuff. And by the way, it's very rare in our entire history. Apartitize just like a decade. I don't think I've ever had a show completely wiped off of an apple without notice like this. It's the first time I've seen it.

No, we've had technical problems where it was an accident or it wasn't appearing properly, it wasn't updating, but we never had a takedown.

Correct. So I was genuinely interested in, like, all right, I'm going to help you out. Happened to be a good day. I had time. I wasn't, you know, booked all day long. So we dug into it and I actually reached out because we have a license with Spotify on our platform. We have a relationship with them. I'm like, all right, let me see what I can do. Reach out to my contacts, the, you know, and the executive portions of the Spotify organization for podcasting. And they replied with a very empathetic email saying, hey, Tom, but this is the way it's done. The only way to deal with it is follow the instructions in the email, have your customer do that. But it still just didn't seem right to me. So, anyway, after a lot of research, what we found out is at first we all thought we and the podcaster, Natalie, thought that the book that she was interviewing this author about was the problem because the email didn't provide a lot of info.

So let's be clear, because you haven't set this up, so you really didn't say who did this. So a big publishing company submitted the DMCA takedown and said that the audio rights of a book that they had the rights to as the publisher were being infringed upon had been violated.

Well, in fact, so the big publisher is Simon and Schuster, but they didn't actually put in the complaint or the claim with Spotify. The claim was put in by a subcontractor they hired named Core Search. And Core Search is one of these companies. And here's one of the big red flags. And the difference of why this is happening now in 2025 and maybe didn't happen years ago is the advent of AI. Because now a company like Core Search can just do an AI search for anything having to do with this book. That they have been hired by Simon and Schuster to go do some research and make sure nobody's violating the rights of this book. And we really don't know the reason why Simon and Schuster wrote reached out to have Core Search do this. Presumably they had some concern that the rights might be violated.

Well, no, no, Tom, Core Search is a predator. I mean, they. This is their job. They deal with fake products on Amazon, impersonators on Instagram. They shut them down 46% faster with 98% success rate.

But there still had to be a reason Simon and Schuster is working with them to protect their interests in some way, looking for actual real violations. The problem that I see with this, Tracy, that Core Search just did an AI search and said, oh, this podcast RSS feed is violating the audio. The sound rights. Right. You said that it was the sound rights of this book, and they put in a complaint with Spotify. Spotify took it down.

So Core Search has an AI first model. They claim to have human expertise, but any human who knows anything about the publishing industry would know that that's not how audio rights work. So that's our next phone call, right, to our good friend Juliet Clark, who knows about these publishing contracts.

Right. And so here's the thing. I learned quite a bit about sound rights for a book, too. And we did reach out to Juliet Clark, who's been a guest of this show many times, and she had some contacts at some publishing companies who are very willing to help or were doing all this research and find out that, yeah, no, the sound rights for a book is really very specific and really has nothing to do with an author talking about their book in a podcast interview. That's a published podcast, right? I mean, really here. And what the sad part is, Natalie and women leaders on the move podcast was doing a favor for this author, interviewing them, giving them exposure, you know, helping raise awareness of their book. So here's really the. The tragedy of what happened here. It's like a perfect storm of AI search and nobody asking the really good reasons why that this claim was filed. In fact, the people that filed the claim didn't really do any due diligence. They just said, oh, this came up in an AI search. Here's the RSS feed for the show. Our next step, file a claim and take it down off Spotify. And so the tragedy is the author who was interviewed and the book they were discussing was not even a Simon and Schuster book. They didn't even have the sentence for that book. What came up in the AI search was only the title of a different book that author had published a couple years earlier that was a Simon and Schuster book. And this literally was Natalie, the host of the show, providing good service to the author and introducing this author to her audience, reading a little bit in her bio, which, by the way, said she's the author of this other book name, which, by the way, I'm not mentioning it because I don't want to come up in an AI search for these people on feed your brand and have my show taken down because of that. So I'm not doing that here. But this other book was. The title of the book was mentioned, and that was it. It wasn't even discussed in the podcast.

This is in an author's bio. She's legitimately the writer of that book. It was a legitimate use of the title in terms of it attributed to the book. I don't even think it was linked actually in the bio or anything. So it wasn't a link to it or anything. You need the title or you'd never find it on Amazon to buy the book. So these things are really shocking that this is what that AI and that company thought was okay. And what this does to me, Tom, is just harks back exactly to the problems with the way image search was happening way back when we were getting constant takedowns from the image companies. Music is doing the same thing. And it was like, you know, going wild on Spotify and on YouTube for a while there. This is what happens in the beginning when the AI does not have any human expertise. So this company can claim that they have that, but somebody didn't step in and said, oh, no, that is allowable use, not only.

And to me, the crime of this, which no one's going to prosecute ever, is that this claimant, Core Search, was just able to file a claim, put up an RSS feed of a show, and tell Spotify there's a violation, and Spotify took down the show. Why? Spotify wants to be in compliance with the DCMA law and not be able to be accused of doing anything that might harm the copyright holder themselves. And that's why they're like, hands off. Oh, somebody made a claim.

And that's why her research can claim a 98% success rate.

Oh, because they get shows taken in. But here's the scary part. And please, those of you listening to this podcast, don't use this for evil, please. But the reality is anybody can go make a claim on Spotify, put in a say this show violates my copyright or my intellectual property rights, give them the RSS feed URL, and Spotify will take it down.

But see, this is where I really feel like Spotify does have an obligation to its content creators. Whether they are musicians or they're podcasters. They have an obligation to require a minimum amount of accurate information before that takedown happens. Because what's occurring here is that they're a party to something that is unlawful. That's not real.

Spotify got used.

Yeah.

Intentionally or not, Spotify got used to shut down a podcast, and it took a full week to get the thing back up. But, you know, even so, eventually, you know, once we figure all this out and Natalie, you know, reaches out, she actually picks up the phone and calls Corsairs, talks to them, she ends up sending them an email with the contact information from the Spotify email and submits Spotify's form. She was doing everything possible because this podcast is a big part of her life, and she was, like, devastated. Now, fortunately, it was still up on Apple, still up on our website, still up everywhere else, but it was taken down from Spotify, which is a, you know, a big listening app a lot of people listen on, and it was important to her. So, I mean, for days, I'm getting emails and phone calls and, you know, wasn't a whole lot we could do except, you know, provide her the information. And. And she ends up reaching out this company, saying, hey, you've made a mistake. There's no sound rights being violated. And, you know, explained why. And eventually, fortunately, Core Search came back and said, we're issuing a retraction of the claim with Spotify. But even after that was done, after many days of back and forth and trying to explain why they were wrong, even after that happened and they retract it, there's still a process that goes on at Spotify, and that takes a bunch of more days before the show gets back on. And so guess what's happened. Natalie was so irked at this whole thing, to put it mildly, that she's like, all right, screw it. I'm deleting that episode from my feed. I have 300 plus other episodes. Do I really need that one up? I was doing this person a favor, and look what happened to me. And so she's just like, boom, deleted. So that now Simon and Schuster is. Well, they weren't actually the publisher of the book they were talking about the authority. And the actual publisher of the book they were talking about now no longer has the exposure from that podcast. I mean, I know they got it in the past, but now they're not continuing to get it. There's no longer, you know, any information about it out there.

So if you were linked from your website's press page, that author was linked to that article. I mean, the blog post that Natalie has on her site, you know, it's gone, right? You just lost promotion and publicity, which was the whole point of your book tour, right? Of you going around and speaking on these podcasts that just. I mean, I have to say that my gut reaction, Tom, was I'm already really annoyed with the poor practices of the publicists out there giving you authors and other things and the practices of the way they send us emails and trying to get them on the show. But this makes me even more unlikely to have an author on my show. And that's a bad precedent to start setting.

It is a bad precedent to set. And you know, there's two more really important points that I want to share with podcasters to help protect themselves from things like this. But also I want to say that I understand why a large company like Spotify, that's an international company, they're based in Sweden, they have huge presence in the US and New York, I believe. And there really were a music platform first. Podcasts are a small fraction of the content that they distribute on Spotify. And I think podcasts are really treated like second class citizens. And I think this is more of a company who's very sensitive to music copyrights, applying different kind of sound rights to a podcast that really shouldn't have been applied in the first place. But they're a big company, they have a process the way they deal with these things and that's it. And they're not gonna make an exception for one independent podcast. That's very unfortunate. But I also find it hard to believe that if Spotify really cared about serving podcasters well, that they couldn't put in a 24 hour or 48 hour waiting period when a claim like this is made and do just a little bit of due diligence. What are you claiming about this? And look into it and then decide, all right, is this really appropriate? And should we take down that show before they go and actually do that? Because they really.

Or just take down an episode like they do on music. Right?

Or just take down an episode would be much more appropriate if there's. And in this case it was one particular episode. But interesting core search didn't identify the episode. They just provided the RSSC for the whole show and said this show violates it, which is part of the problem. It was just one episode. And instead of putting a band aid on the wound, they killed the patient. Right. I mean they just took it all away.

So, Tom, I want to just like thinking this through from that model is I can't see that happening. But in the Amazon world, because, you know, you and I worked in that world for a really long time in the Amazon product world, a whole business industry, like I used to have this partner I used to refer people to at product launch hazards from that podcast. I used to refer them to this, the lawyer over there whose job was to reinitiate from a takedown. Right, to get your.

Your product reinstated so it could be sold again.

Yeah, right. But there's money lost. That's the real problem here. There's no money.

Well, there's no money in sales that were lost in that week. Her show was down. But, Tracy, there is a lot of money that went into creating that podcast and that episode.

I'm not talking about on her end. I'm talking about there's no money for them from the infringement. If there was one. This is not an audiobook, which is what they should have been going after. If there's an audiobook, that would be sound rights. Right. If there's an unauthorized audio book that was being sold, there's money for Simon and Schuster to make. But publicity. Going after publicity for your book authors and your books is stupid because what you're doing is you're taking down the only thing that might be selling that book.

And I really don't think it was their intent to take down publicity. I really don't either. Neither Simon Schuster nor Core Research. I don't think that was their intent. This was a very bad application of intellectual property rights that in artificial intelligence that did not really check. Hey, we want to take down people that are actually violating our copyrights. Are we sure this is one of those? Okay, yes, let's do it. That didn't happen. It was very much an automated process. At some point, there was a person that had to fill out the form on Spotify's website to do it. So there was a human being involved. Well, I don't know.

Maybe there was a bot. There is on Amazon, filling them out for all those companies who are doing takedowns.

Yeah, I know that bots can fill out forms, but I don't think that could happen here.

But my point was, is that you have no help as a podcaster. You're going to have no help reinstating you because there's no money in it. That lawyer used to make money off of getting the product reinstated. He could get paid. If I got you reinstated, then you pay me a fee, Right? So now I've done the job and I get paid for it. So there's no fee here. There's no money to be made for a company to help you get reinstated when this goes really wrong. You are on your own now, Natalie Benimu. And you know the podcast was lucky that she could call you, right, because we have a phone number. Not many people do.

Yeah, she just hosts her podcast on Potatoes. She's a do it yourself host. Or fortunately, we have phone support, which I don't know of any other podcast company that does, but.

Well, but if she hadn't thought to do That, I mean, it would have gone into email and it would have been like two days before it might have gotten to you. And somebody didn't think it was a joke and spam. Because when I first looked at it, I thought, oh, it's a joke, it's spam. Right? Is she really down? Like, that's what I thought. I thought it was fake.

Yeah, I know, because we do get. You know, I wondered at first if it was any kind of a scam email to try to get her to go to a link and pay some money to get back up or something and they were going to take her money, but it wasn't. This was a legitimate Spotify takedown and a claim made to Spotify. But. So what are some of the takeaways from here? I'm going to go from sort of the. I would say some advice here and then get to sort of what is the unfortunate and sad reality of us independent podcasters in this industry with regard to this? But first of all, make sure that when you interview someone on your podcast, number one, you have gotten them to give permission for you to do it. Now, I am not an attorney and I am not giving legal advice, but whenever we have somebody book on our podcast, they have to acknowledge they're going to be recorded and they're acknowledged that it's going to be published and they're agreeing to that. You want to be able to have some actual action that the guest author or otherwise needs to take to say, yes, I'm giving you my permission to do this and have that documented and save it, because you may need that someday in the future. Now, I agree that if somebody's going to be complained too much, you can always delete their episode, especially if it was five years ago. I've done that before and we've done that, right?

Yeah. But I want to add here also that not only are they accepting the recording of it, but the bio and information that they provide should be submitted along with that form. So any images, anything like that, so that you have a standard guest waiver for everything that they're providing to you saying, I acknowledge that I'm giving this to you and I have the rights.

To use it right now, having said that, which is definitely a best practice for all of us podcasters. And if you're not doing that, start doing it. You know, even if there. You have some episodes in the past, whether you have some exposure and you can't prove it, even if you did have their permission, you know, obviously they came out and Recorded with you. Maybe you have that recording saved where they're willingly recording and you're talking about it being a podcast, whatever, hopefully you have something, but start doing it better now, even if you haven't done it in the past, there's no time too soon to start doing it right. And anybody who's legitimately wanting to be a guest on your show is going to agree to it. This isn't a tough ask. However, as this example illustrates, even though Natalie had that permission from her guest, and we all get permission, most of us, we get permission from our guests for all of our episodes where we interview a guest, it wouldn't have prevented this show from being taken down. And it didn't in this case, even if you have the permission, because this was a take the show down, ask questions later, later on the part of Spotify. And even having permission from the author in this case wasn't really the issue. The issue was they filed a claim for something that didn't apply to a podcast, and it took a while to get that sorted out. So, you know, I know some of you hearing this may think, well, that's probably pretty rare. That's probably not going to happen to me. I'm not going to worry about it. I hope you're right. But I'll tell you, we have seen a parallel to this with image copyright rights on websites, and we've done past episodes on it. Tracy mentioned it earlier. You can search on the feed your brand page of podcasters united.com for image Copyrights and you'll see the couple episodes where we've talked about that. We have seen a lot of predators who are trying to make money and take advantage of unsuspecting website owners who have used stock images on their website, license them properly. But if you can't prove you have the image, you're in big trouble. And it can cost you a lot of money.

And this is a classic case, Tom, because of the date, right? They usually start with older episodes, older images, older music. Like it starts with older stuff because they think you won't have documentation.

Well, and if it's older, you've been violating in air quotes here the copyright for longer and the damage they can try to assess is higher. But I get concerned that this kind of thing is now going to start to happen and creep into this type of a sound rights issue with podcasts, and we may see more predators filing things like this. And even though having the documented release and position, documented release and evidence that you had every right to publish that in that podcast, your show may still get taken down. And so maybe then the only other takeaway is okay, if it's going to happen, if it happens to you, accept it. Don't try to call up Spotify or email them and argue the good reasons why they shouldn't have done it, because they don't care. That's not their role. And I know it sounds callous, but the reality is they don't care about one independent podcast or even 100 on a given day. Who knows what happens at Spotify every day? They don't care. You've got to find out who filed the claim, reach out to them, and explain to them they've made a mistake, or ask them the question, why did you file this claim? What do you think that I'm doing? To violate your copyright, you have to have that discussion. Your fastest path to getting your show up again is getting them to agree to retract their claim. That's really all you can do. And that's really sad.

And even it goes so far as to contact the author, like, go through the whole model. I did this even with the images. I would go to the image library and I would message the image creator. Cause a lot of times they didn't even know it was happening on their behalf. Like, someone owned a bunch of them and was just doing that. And so their name is being damaged in that process, and they need to say something to their publisher or they need to say something. So in this particular case, I think the author might have ghosted Natalie, so she didn't have that opportunity. She couldn't get an answer. And so that's always a little dangerous. But if somebody reaches out to you, try to help them, they did you a favor. The podcast host had you on their show. Try to help them discover what's going on and get to the bottom of it, and maybe they'll keep your episode up instead of thinking you're too much trouble and not worth it anymore. So that's also, I think, a lesson here that wasn't discussed. So I want to say, you know, if you were with us live on Zoom, which you can be if you are a part of the Podcasters United community, we've got Juliet Clark in the room with us, our author expert, and she's going to talk about some of these things, because author publicity, book tours, podcast tours, all of those things is a big part of what she recommends and does with her authors. And so if you are getting yourself involved and you're an author about to embark on some of those things, you need some best practices and you need to make sure that you're helping things out and not making things worse for those podcast hosts. You want to be as grateful to them as possible so that you're no trouble and you can get on the next show. Because if the gut reaction to this and the industry starts to have more and more of these real harsh damages done to you and slight spelt for something, the podcasters are going to start revolting. I mean, this is what has happened. I think I was mentioning before in the publicist. I really don't take emails from publicists. I might take them directly from an author or directly from another host, but I don't take them from the publicist anymore because so many of them are unprofessional and they're not real, they're AI. So it's not helpful. If we get into that situation with the authors, it's going to hurt your ability to promote your book, and we don't want to see that happen. So make sure you're employing the best practices possible.

Yeah, I agree with that. You know, Tracy, I also reached out to Gordon Firemark, who's the podcast lawyer. We've had him on the show before about this whole situation and he offered to have another discussion with me. But we record another episode. I just realized I've got a question for him because all of us podcasters, when we record an episode and publish it, that episode is inherently copyrighted. That's our intellectual property. And when our show gets taken down incorrectly, to me that may be a violation of our copyright. And I would love to find a way that we could assert that and start having some pressure going back the other way to put these companies on notice not to, you know, be too casual in filing these claims that have such deep consequences, you know.

Well, I think if you are making money, like, I mean, Spotify would never let that happen to Joe Rogan show, right? Like, I mean, they're not going to let it happen to a show that they make a lot of money off the ads on. So I think that that's also part of the problem is that you have to realize that there's no money exchanged for most of our podcasters, for most of the independent podcasters. So there are no damages at the end of the day. And that's unfortunate. It's damaging to your business, but it's less direct. If you were making ads, I think you'd have a case. But I'm not a lawyer.

I think it's going to change a bit in the future, especially with some of the things we're planning in the podcast industry, that there might actually be monetary harm for this, and then maybe that'll make people, you know, think twice before acting quickly.

Well, I mean, I think Amazon, though, there is a good example of that, like, I mean, Amazon, which is take down and not really care. And, you know, it did do. It did do a lot of harm and disruption to a lot of Amazon seller businesses. And, and it became the cost of doing business and competitors were doing harm by actually doing takedowns that were unwarranted. So, I mean, I think it did do a bunch of damage to Amazon and I think that's what could happen here. Spotify doesn't pay attention. It's going to do a bunch of damage to Spotify.

All right, well, I've ranted enough about this. I'm going to calm down again. So we're going to go now and have what I think is going to be some interesting discussion with those people here live in our coaching call. And if you're listening to the podcast, you know, check it out. Go to podcasters united.com sign up for our newsletter powell.org I always get that wrong. Podcast.org sign up for our newsletter and you'll find out what our upcoming coaching call topic is. And then you could join it and ask questions if you want to.

Yeah, we always have the zoom link in there and you can join us live. It's, you know, easy to do. You just click through the link on that newsletter and you're in and you can ask us questions. And in this case, you get to connect up with Juliet Clark, our superbrand publishing expert, and she can answer questions, too.

All right, until next time, this has been Tom and Tracy on feed.

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