Ditto music does not promote meaningful music

 

Ditto Music Blocks Anti-Fascist Release: A Statement on Free Speech and Corporate Censorship

This week I received a message from Ditto Music regarding my forthcoming release titled Dulce et Decorum Est. In their words:

“In compliance with music platform guidelines your release contains content that is deemed insensitive or showing political or cultural bias. For this reason we are unable to distribute your content to stores.”

Let’s be clear: what they mean is that my music is politically engaged — and more to the point, it is intolerant of fascism. The track in question deals with the realities of war, nationalism, and settler-colonial violence. In other words, it dares to challenge the status quo. It refuses to be neutral in the face of injustice. It honours Wilfred Owen’s legacy not by sanitising it, but by updating it for the brutalities of our time.

If Ditto Music finds such content objectionable, then the inference is hard to avoid: they are protecting fascism from critique. They are shielding empire from reckoning. In censoring this track, Ditto Music is not “avoiding bias” — they are enforcing one: the bias of colonial silence, of commercialised apoliticism, of complicity.

Let’s also not forget: Ditto Music is based in the United Kingdom — a country whose own historical and contemporary entanglements with settler-colonial regimes are far from neutral. That context makes their refusal to distribute this track especially telling. Update: Their most recent missive claims I am “misinformed”. According to them, it's the TCs of the music distributors like Apple, Spotify etc.— that it is they who prohibit political content. This is clearly untrue, unless it means any NEW political content is prohibited. After all, Apple, Spotify and others contain Marilyn Manson, Green Day, Skunk Anansi, and many other musicians who make POLITICAL points. What is Cranberry’s Zombie if not a cry against the violence of The Troubles in Northern Ireland? What about Pink Floyds The Wall? It is clearly anti-fascist and derived from the trauma of World War 2, it is amply clear that it is political. Is that now going to be taken down? I doubt it, because that’s all established lucrative content.

Ditto Music has not explained which lines or lyrics were problematic. They have not engaged in good faith. But they have made one thing very clear: truth makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is their problem, not mine.

-- update, they have said they will refund me, but not rescind their decision to sell only contentless music. So : until I get an apology, and an offer to TRY to get the tracks published, gratis, I will not be interested in self-censoring, thanks.Ditto Mu





sic, Ditto Music Ltd, Ditto Music Limited, Ditto Plus, Ditto Publishing, Ditto Management, music distribution, release unlimited music, sell your music, keep 100% of your royalties, global music distribution, music publishing, music promotion, sync licensing, music mastering, YouTube Content ID, smart links, split royalties, Ditto App, free pre-save links, submit for playlists, music video distribution, start a record label, official chart registration, upload lyrics, add credits to Spotify, auto-split royalties, pitch your music for sync, AI online music mastering, pre-save on Spotify, SmartLink, YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, upload to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Amazon Music, Deezer, YouTube, Instagram, Tidal, Vevo, Beatport, SEO for musicians, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, title tag, meta description, header tags, alt text, backlinks, keyword optimization, domain name, Google Knowledge Graph, YouTube SEO tags, YouTube SEO descriptions, YouTube SEO titles, analytics and tracking, call to action, YouTube channel, thumbnail, YouTube tags, YouTube Studio analytics, upload schedule, playlist series, behind-the-scenes clips, YouTube paid advertising, #PoweredByDitto, filters and stickers, social media engagement, earn rewards, music metadata, track title, artist name, producer, writer, genre, duration, ISRC code, explicit label, instrumental label, release type



Popular posts from this blog

The risks of Deepfakes and a proposal to combat them - Edited

Author note. I wrote this article below after seeing the "Sassy Justice" deepfake online in 2021. Since then the matter has become much more serious since the proliferation of online AI tools in the last year. Update : The proposal has been updated to include copyright of one's own voice in the wake of the Stephen Fry incident and another example of cyberstalking with facial recognition.  Update 2:  Denmark has just enacted this. Update 3: The USA is considering legislation like this.  https://petapixel.com/2023/10/16/no-fakes-act-seeks-to-ban-unauthorized-ai-generated-likenesses   Proposal to United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Pre-empting the problem of Deepfake videos Background We presently stand on the edge of an abyss in which social media threatens to uproot our world order and cast us into chaos, as we see with the recent attacks (6 January 2021) on the American Capitol by conspiracy theorists incentivised on social media. Deepfake videos are motion pic...
Read more

Risks of ChatGPT

 Having fiddled with ChatGPT for a while now, I have identified the following two risks. 1. Hallucination . It sometimes just makes stuff up. This is particularly annoying when you give it the information and it goes on a tangent and makes stuff up that was not in the source information. For example, when I gave it some meeting notes, it went on a tangent about N-P completeness in computer science. OK?!? 2. Memory errors . The memory feature that they have added messes up a lot. I have noticed that it performs two mistakes: Recites what it gave you previously , even if the topic was utterly different . For example I gave it some meeting notes to summarise and it spat out some Python code that I had asked for last year. Totally irrelevant! Recites what it gave you previously, because the content was similar , in its opinion. I created a new chat, gave it the meeting notes, and it gave me the PREVIOUS summary of the previous set of meeting notes. In one case it was even worse! It g...
Read more

Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa - my theory

So, Ramaphosa met Trump. Cue the performative outrage. But behind the cameras, away from the staged handshakes, something bigger happened. Something quieter, and a lot whiter. Let’s talk about the new policy direction that suddenly appeared in our Government Gazette on 23 May 2025. Titled with all the dull, bureaucratic camouflage they could find, it’s really about one thing: letting multinational ICT corporations into South Africa without forcing them to sell equity to black South Africans — as long as they “invest” in transformation through what they call Equity Equivalent Investment Programmes (EEIPs). Sounds progressive? Read slower. It’s a corporate bypass valve, one already designed and requested long ago by the same big players who always seem to need a “special exemption” from black economic empowerment. Now, let’s talk timing. You don’t have to be a political analyst to notice that this policy shift drops immediately after Ramaphosa’s charm offensive in the US — where he rolle...
Read more