Cataract of Dreams Online
Our music can be heard online on various platforms. It is possible to download our music via Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-want basis.
As with all of our personal projects, our goal is not to optimise its reach or popularity, instead we aim to make it easily and openly accessible while staying true to our ideals. Thus, early on, we dedicated much effort into sharing our music on a large number of platforms, only to leave many of them again, one by one.
We decided to be transparent with the reasons behind these decisions. To keep it short we will not go into detail for all platforms we are (no longer) on, but the following will provide an hopefully informative overview.
Google is using YouTube videos for the training of generative AI without consent or an option to opt out. We do not want to contribute with our art.
Despite having a remarkable market share in music streaming, Spotify is paying artists very poorly, significantly less than the majority of their competitors. Still, many artists see no choice but to share their music on Spotify due to the platforms size. We do not want to support this vicious cycle, which is based entirely on the platforms popularity.
To be honest, we see many problems with Amazon, even when disregarding the way Amazon is treating content. However to keep this on the topic of art, Amazon does not seem to have any issues in distributing completely AI created books, often times deceiving customers. The general unscrupolous mindset of the platform stopped any thought on publishing our music there early on.
According to statements of SoundCloud, they are not currently using the music shared on their platform for training of generative AI. However we are not convinced, that this will persist. It is tedious and time consuming to proofread any change in the Terms of Service, thus we decided to part ways (somewhat prophylactic) with SoundCloud.
