Cindy Lee removes all music from Spotify
Cindy Lee, the performance and songwriting project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, has removed their entire catalogue from all streaming platforms, including Spotify. It now resides exclusively on Bandcamp.
Lee’s works will no longer appear on Spotify, Apple Music, or the other streaming platforms; they are only available through Bandcamp. The website also includes a full slate of vinyl reissues available for pre-order via W.25TH, a subsidiary of Superior Viaduct. The reissues are scheduled for release on October 31st.
Their 2020 Cat O’ Nine Tails is also available online for the first time. It was initially released just two months after What’s Tonight to Eternity. This project was hailed as a direct predecessor to the two-hour spaghetti-western-influenced masterpiece, Diamond Jubilee.
Lee joins an exodus of artists who are boycotting Spotify due to the troubling dealings of their CEO, Daniel Ek. It was recently announced that Ek is leading a €600 million investment into a start-up company specialising in artificial intelligence military software.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have also removed all of their songs from Spotify. The Australian group announced the decision via Instagram, writing, “Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better? Join us on another platform.” The backdrop to the statement was a close-up picture of the on-the-rise band The Velvet Sundown, who have appeared in many Spotify playlists despite not even being real.
Deerhoof also pulled their music from the platform. They wrote, “The statement later slammed Spotify, stating, “Spotify is flushing itself down the toilet. Eventually artists will want to leave this already widely hated data-mining scam masquerading as a “music company.” It’s creepy for users and crappy for artists. Music-making lasts forever but this or that digital get-rich-quick scheme is sure to become obsolete.”
In a four and a half star review of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, Far Out wrote, “Even the imperfections, of which there are naturally a few in the two-hour experiment, seem to express a sense of moving senescence, as though the album is an evolving body of work rather than a fixed and polished analogue product. The mystic Cindy Lee character that Patrick Flegel puts forth even plays a part in eliciting thoughts of unbound creativity in the post-truth age. And all of this is done with stirring skill and sweet catchiness.”
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