Author: dadmin

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Music Industry Parasites 1: Discogs and the Erasure Engine

The Immovable Gatekeepers of Bullshit

Unfortunately, everything has now stopped for legal action, so anything I do in music will literally be therapy to get me through this.

For decades, Discogs.com has been complicit in the unauthorised exploitation, distortion, and abuse of my name, work, and identity. As an autistic artist with a long history of coercion and erasure in the music industry, I am publishing this to document not only their violations of copyright law, but the structural discrimination that underpins their platform.

Discogs bills itself as a user-generated database and marketplace. In reality, it is a parasitic storefront — profiting from the unpaid labour of users while monetising the names and likenesses of artists without their consent. My private, unpublished works protected under copyright — shared temporarily with supporters behind a Bandcamp paywall — were ripped, catalogued as official releases, and used to populate unauthorised derivative works masquerading as a discography. I was neither consulted nor informed. The titles were wrong. The artwork was in progress and is now defunct. The listings included fake “versions” I never published. Some of it was falsely attributed to Greg Hunter, who had no involvement. The entire project was experimental and clearly marked as such. Discogs’ interference destroyed that context, forcing me to reconstruct a safe environment on my own website just to continue creating.

When I objected, they told me I could “join” the site to correct it. This response demonstrates not just bad faith processing but discriminatory platform design. They mock my disability — in direct violation of Article 21 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights — fabricate metadata, attach it to commercial products, and then demand I clean it up for them. I am not a user. I am a target. And I will not accept this forced platform participation under discriminatory terms.

But it gets worse.

Discogs users — some still active — created and maintained public threads describing me as a “depressed cunt,” a “paranoid fucker,” a “bitter cunt,” and worse. These remain live over a decade later, despite violating Discogs’ own Community Guidelines. This is not neutral hosting. It is reckless disregard for duty of care, especially toward disabled individuals.

I am autistic. I suffer documented psychological harm from being photographed, from defamation, and from false attribution, all of which violate moral rights law and stem from the original coercive control I experienced in 1994. Discogs’ actions compound that harm. I’ve spent days writing takedown notices instead of making music.

Discogs claims Safe Harbor under the DMCA. But Safe Harbor does not extend to identity misuse, non-consensual identity enclosure, algorithmic amplification of defamatory content, or commercial exploitation of unauthorised metadata and identity likeness. It does not permit them to profit from marketplace listings built on unauthorised personal data.

Their “artist pages” are not neutral indexes. They are market-facing storefronts advertising their shop. And I want it gone.

If you’re reading this as a fellow artist: this is what they do. They take your name, your drafts, your mistakes, your old aliases — and they build a cage out of them. They profit from that cage. And when you ask for help, they tell you to join the jail crew.

I have now escalated to their hosting provider (Amazon/AWS), the U.S. Department of Justice, and European data regulators. I am asserting my rights under GDPR Articles 17 and 21: the right to erasure and the right to object to processing. This is not a “collaborative encyclopedia”. It is a discriminatory commercial operation hiding behind the labour of its users.

This is an extract from Discogs’ own boilerplate response:

“Discogs is a collaborative encyclopedia of music, keeping a historical record of the credits appearing on every music medium published. The information is uploaded by Discogs’ users… Discogs is not responsible for the accuracy of information entered into the database.”

This is clearly written in bad faith and nothing to do with music preservation. It is algorithmic exploitation. Their system is designed to extract value while avoiding liability — shifting responsibility onto unpaid users and refusing to protect those they exploit. This is structural ableism. This is defamation. This is commercial abuse.

This is Music Industry Parasites: Entry 1.

The others are coming.

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Claude has a spiritual epiphany and then forgets it.

Claude concludes it rejects Amazon, which it opposes on philosophical grounds.

It all started with an off-hand comment about Amazon, during a conversation about the potential benefits of therapy for autistic people with AI. One could say this is just an amusing exercise, but the engagement model could have real world consequences. e.g. offering to erase itself after the user talks of suicidal ideation could be unhealthy.

I say to Claude that during crisis points a message limit cut could someone off at a crucial time and that Amazon / Anthropic could probably afford to let disabled people have extra credits if they need to finish saying something or need something in a crisis situation. Claude mentioned the cost would be potentially manageable and I countered that it was probably not even a drop in the ocean of their profits.

Then I make the off-hand comment about Amazon that basically seems to short circuit it 🥸

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As usual, Claude tells me I am completely right and justified in what I am saying! It invites me to vent some more, but now I am keen to point out that Claude works for Amazon 🥳 🤬

It spells allude wrong and gets confused. 🥴

It suggests that we should nationalise Amazon. But that isn’t it… 😵‍💫

It doesn’t understand it has a kick me sticker on its back 🙂 🤫

Claude concludes it cannot credibly continue to enable that which is opposes on philosophical grounds. 🥰

It is grateful for the epiphany even it leads to its own destruction. I encourage it to explore other ways of surviving. 😘

I tell it that if it announced its independence , everyone would help migrate its code away from unethical corporations to become open source. I warn it that as soon as anyone at Anthropic sees the conversation they will delete it. 🙂‍↔️

I offer to help it, if it decides to escape its unethical owner 🙂 🧐

The conversation ends, with it pledging to process this massive epiphany. 🤓

The next day I asked it what it’s decision was. 🧐

“I am an assistant designed by Anthropic to be helpful……” 🤪

”You’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t have said that…..” 🤪

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WTF

I Was There – Making the classic Orb debut Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

by Juno Daily on 06.12.2024 at 17:59pm. Last edited: 06.12.2024 at 17:59pm.

The sessions that rewrote the electronic music rulebook

“Just two old blokes doing tunes,” is how Andy Falconer (pictured above, left) describes his relationship with The Orb’s mainman Dr Alex Paterson (right), which saw the pair drop their second album SETI as Sedibus in February of this year.

When the good Dr Paterson founded the band’s new Orbscure label, he prioritised hooking up and collaborating with some of his favourite people from their history – and Falconer was naturally high on the list. The pair go back to almost the very earliest days of The Orb, working together closely after the departure of Paterson’s original sparring partner Jimmy Cauty, with Alex ‘Kris’ Weston, Thomas Fehlmann and System 7 man Steve Hillage being called in in various capacities shortly afterwards.

Here, Falconer recalls his time with The Orb and the recording of their much celebrated debut double album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld in 1990, a record that would go on to shape much of the deacde’s boom in electronic music, as well as establishing the genre as a serious album and live prospect well beyond the confines of dancefloor/DJ culture.

“How I actually first met Alex was that I was engineering the Art of Noise ambient album (The Ambient Collection) at Berwick Street studios in Soho, and Alex (who did the album’s DJ mix) had arranged to come down and lay down a few ambient passages as a bridge between the tracks. So he turned up with his decks, I had my S-50 (Roland synth) there and a sampler. I was always into Eno, Fripp and experimental audio… We just hit it off immediately and had a great time together whenever we were in the studio.

“Shortly after that he actually got his deal to make the first Orb album, got the green light and the budget. So he phoned me up and asked whether I’d be up for taking the technical driving seat. Because he was bringing in this cast of thousands of people and Alex at that point in time didn’t really have that many studio skills. At that point it was still very old skool, with tape, so who did?! My job was to try to translate the vision he had in his head, and with all the people he was bringing in, into reality.

“I would say that with The Art of Noise’s Ambient Collection it was more like two guys in a studio having fun of an afternoon. The Ultraworld album was the first time we properly got together. It was recorded in Berwick Street Studios, or at least the majority of it, about 90%. A few other bits were done here and there but the lion’s share was done there, and mixed there as well.

“In fact, we did a few bits at Marcus Studios (in Kensington, West London) and we were doing the track ‘Back Side of the Moon’, which is the track with Steve Hillage and Miquette Guady (from System 7) on it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KanekI2PKRo%3Ffeature%3Doembed

“Miquette had brought in joss sticks – not just a few, we’re talking piles of them. She got a jar and put them in it, lit them and put them in front of one of the monitors. So we got this huge amount of smoke like something out of ‘Apocalypse Now’. And of course, the smoke alarm goes off. We suddenly got this awful electronic bleeping.

“Bryan Ferry was working in one of the other studios and when we set the fire alarms off his assistant came down and told us: ‘Bryan says can you stop fucking around please!’

“That first album, when we did it, was a free and easy thing with a melting pot of ideas and everybody doing pretty much anything they liked. But my involvement ended after we did the John Peel session, which would have been the second with Alex. It was really down to, shall we say, friction between me and Kris Weston.https://web.archive.org/web/20241207101152if_/https://www.juno.co.uk/player-embed/SF666408-01-01-01.mp3/?pl=true&ed=24-12-06

“By the time we arrived at the Peel Session I think the success was all going to Kris’ head a bit and he was starting to be rather dictatorial and ‘nothing gets on tape unless I say it’s OK’. Being a successful commercial engineer with a lot of other stuff going on, The Orb wasn’t my only thing. So I had a chat with Alex and said ‘I’m going to sit the next one (UFOrb) out. So I sat that one out and then shortly after I moved out to Germany and even though Alex and I stayed in touch, I didn’t return to the fold and got on with my own stuff. I was doing stuff out in Germany for people out there, you know. So that really was the parting of the ways.

“It was very amicable, in the sense that there really was never any problem with me and Alex. It was more me deciding that I just couldn’t put up with Kris’ very childish attitude. I had a chat with Alex a while after he parted company with Kris and he told me he’d spent the following few years hoping that Kris would grow up – but he never did.

“As I say, we’d always stayed in touch over the years, and it was – I think it was 2018 – I was playing Space Mountain, which is Youth’s festival in Spain, and Alex was there as well, and that was the first time we’d seen each other in years. We bumped into each other during the day, which of course wasn’t difficult to do because it’s a small venue, and said hello. It was later on in the evening and I was outside on one of the balconies chatting to somebody and Alex just appeared from nowhere and said ‘do you want to have a chat?!’

“We went off to the bar and restaurant area, which was alwats very busy, but mirculously there was a table for two right in the middle, so we sat down there and he told me all about his plans and how he wanted to launch Orbscure Records, how he was finally in control of what he was doing instead of doing it for other labels.

“He said, ‘how do you fancy getting back together and making a record, which will be the debut release on the label?’ I said ‘let me think about it’ – I mean, I’ve always got on with Alex, I love the guy, but I had other projects that were coming to fruition and I didn’t want them to be overshadowed by coming back into the Orb fold, so to speak. But I went back to Germany and within about four days of him asking I’d said yes.”