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Bye, Bye, No CDBaby Pie

We received a message from Securus, our tablet vendor about a week or so ago:

Hello from Securus.
As you know, we are continually updating our Media Store music catalog to bring you the latest and greatest in listening options. As part of this ongoing effort -- and as outlined in our Terms and Conditions -- some content must occasionally be removed. Soon, a small number of tracks from two music labels will no longer be available. However, youll still have access to hundreds of thousands of songs from a wide variety of other artists and labels.

What's changing:

After October 29, 2025, music provided by two labels -- CDBaby and DistroKid -- will no longer be available for purchase or download.

Top Artists Associated with these Labels
CDBaby: Trae and Z-Ro, dj rara, Country Studio Crew, Bryann T, Tennessee All Stars, Highway Bros, Brooks Jefferson, Ron Shepard, Big Pokey, and Tk Soul, among others.

DistroKid: MJFPmusic, CityBoy_Sosa, LitoCheeto, Draco Hndrx, Datmeskendj, Dj BennyOlolo, DJ D PORTER, KSOPOPPII38, America Anne, and 21Chits, among others.

What this means for you:

Facilities with Music Purchases
If you previously PURCHASED songs or albums from these labels, you WILL still see the songs in your My Music library and CAN continue to enjoy those tracks. If you would like to purchase additional tracks from CDBaby or DistroKid artists, there's still time -- just be sure to complete your purchase before October 29.

Facilities with Music Subscriptions
If your facility offers music subscriptions and you have DOWNLOADED songs or albums from these labels, unfortunately, those tracks will NO LONGER be available to you after October 29th. Our apologies that we cannot offer you a purchase option at this time.

We remain committed to offering you a rich and diverse music experience, and we appreciate your understanding as we continue to improve the catalog.

In service,
Your Securus Team

(Minor edits made solely to replace punctuation that I can't transmit: curly quotes, em dashes.)

What this really means for me?
HEY PEPPERCOYOTE and BUCKTOWN TIGER, your music disappeared from our store yesterday! The album covers show, but if we tap, we see the screen blink, then return "Unable to find store page".

We seem to have had a recent invasion of music that was gathered from SoundCloud artists in the last couple of months prior to this announcement. It's possible this is real music, not AI generated, but...

  • 10-30 tracks for $2.23
  • All of the names are always alphabetical in order, with a fixation on one letter (e.g. A, B, B, C, C, C, C, C, D, E...)
  • The album covers are strikingly similar to each other
  • The publisher is Ant Music
  • There's an article in Newsstand on AI Slop -- the generated garbage that borrows from actually produced music

I feel highly suspicious about these artists, but I've been informed that one list of artists I was curious about appear to be real and have SoundCloud accounts with almost zero listeners.

Of course, this recent flooding of low cost music might have benefits for Securus! Buy an album for $2.23 (or less), or buy one song for $1.51-$1.97, knowing that if you buy a single track then buy the album, you do not get a discount? Most of us will buy the $2.23 album, because we do not make money in our jobs on the compound, and if the samples sound good, this saves us money when we buy the entire album. Likewise, if the sample promised one thing, but the music delivered another as a full download, we're less likely to file tickets for a refund on a cheap album.

As another point, the removal of DistroKid and CDBaby artists does not have a particularly outsized impact on us: unless we knew the artist published music through either of those labels through other sources, we have absolutely no clue where our music comes from, unless the artist name field here actually includes CDBaby or DistroKid.
Other than the occasional artist tag that includes [CDBaby] or [DistroKid], we incarcerated many were truly in the dark, unknowingly complicit in whatever may have led to the so-called end of their stay on our platform, and as my greetings to two people above didn't exactly indicate, not all artists received those tags on their now removed music!
I only knew of their use of CDBaby through a reply to an earlier blog post, just saying.

It is my hope that my experience with Securus' music platform will come to a satisfactory conclusion soon; I just need to take a deep breath and focus. But for now, at least there's no more CDBaby, no more DistroKid for us.