On the artist who deleted their music

Every few months a track disappears from one of the playlists. Sometimes it's licensing — a deal expired, the label pulled the catalogue. Sometimes the artist asked for it to come down themselves. Once or twice the artist has deleted their entire body of work. The hole is in the playlist for a few hours before I have to decide what to do.

My rule, learned the hard way: don't try to backfill immediately. The hole is information. It tells the listener that the playlist is connected to real-world music, made by real people, who can change their minds. A backfilled track within an hour pretends the previous track wasn't important; leaving the hole for a week acknowledges that it was.

Sometimes the artist comes back, sometimes they don't. Either way, the playlist is honest about what it is — a curated room, not an archive. The music it can offer is the music the artist is willing to have offered. The listener who notices the change has learned something true about how streaming works.

What I won't do is rip the track from another source and re-upload it under a different name to keep the playlist 'complete.' The completeness is fake at that point. The room is allowed to have a missing track, the same way a wall is allowed to have a faded square where a picture used to hang. The fade tells you something the picture didn't.