I disputed YouTube's legal claims and wrote a compelling and detailed defense that this was indeed our release and we owned the rights to the recording. All I got back from them was... NOPE. That was it. No explanation. They just simply didn't think it was my right to claim monetization. I don't know HOW they came to this, since our album was clearly released a year earlier. I call bullsh-t! Someone's playing Candy Crush all day and not doing their job.

This reminded me of all the frustration I felt after we'd licensed our Chillodesiac CD for a repackage and re-release to a guy in California. He put out the record as "The Midnight Sessions", but then ended up doing a 180 on some of the material terms of the contract and when we disputed it, he got mad at us and completely stopped promoting the record.

At a certain point, I noticed that ALL of our Chillodesiac YouTube videos had been linked to purchase The Midnight Sessions versions of our songs instead of our Chillodesiac release. YouTube did that. On every single one of our song videos, if someone would click through to purchase the music, it would take them to that other guy's release on Amazon or iTunes instead of ours.

Mind you, we paid $1,800 in lawyer's fees when we were entering into the agreement with this guy, and not only did he never give us one dime of compensation for any CDs he sold, he didn't even give us royalty statements to show us how much he sold or how much he still needed to recoup on the project before we would get paid. Also, at the end of the 3 year term, he was supposed to destroy all remaining unsold CDs, but you can still find it for sale on Amazon. We do not see one penny of the money from those sales. Never have, never will apparently.

And of course, he doesn't respond to my emails.

All of our YouTube videos that I had personally made and posted were sending the general public to HIS release instead of OURS. For YEARS. I tried to contact YouTube and tell them of their error but once again, all I got in response was NOPE. Not gonna fix it. [Now, though, for some reason there are absolutely NO purchase links generated on those videos anymore. So at least they don't link people to his release, but they don't link them to ours either.]

So... back to the shysters in Turkey. After I was unsuccessful with YouTube to claim my rights of monetizing my own music off of my own video, I tried contacting all of the other artists from whom they'd stolen music on the Larespark album. I simply used my Shazam app and looked them up on the internet. I was only able to track down half of the artists, and only one of them had any type of record label over them to help defend them. They were all upset, but in the end, none of us could really do anything about it.

So, for my own emotional well being... I had to just move on.

BUT WAIT! It's not over. Here's what I got today, while putting out our newest "Instrumental Chill" release. After uploading the instrumental version of "Besame Mucho" to SoundCloud [which we call "Kiss Me" since our instrumental track was a reconstruction and has nothing to do with the original Besame Mucho composition], this email came in.