The only online music store with (on-demand) digital reissues for real music lovers.

Rediscover sough-after records on Revibed, the first-ever online music store bringing your favourite old-school jams back from the brink of obscurity.

We’ve witnessed first hand how a lot of the older music we love has become extremely hard to find and/or unaffordable to most people. On top of that, being brought out on vinyl or cassette means that these works will not be around forever.

So we set out to digitally preserve our global musical heritage and change the music industry for (the) good.

How did I learn about Revibed and their fine efforts, you ask? They were selling my work without authorization, of course. So much for changing the music industry for the good. Revibed is just more of the same old greed-based archival bullshit.

In my case, I found them selling digital rips of Soulnessless EP 1 (K-S.H.E remixes of "Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning"), and my collaborative album with Jane Dowe, Institutional Collaborative. My first impression of their website was that they were simply putting an elaborate face on your usual illegal download sales site, in order to convince customers that they are selling authorized content. I assumed they were not an actual business. On April 4, 2024, I sent them an email with a generic DCMA takedown request (the standard removal process based on copyright ownership). To my surprise, and their credit, I received a reply on April 5 from "Revibed Artist Support" confirming that the files had been removed. I thought that was the end of it.

However, after a few weeks have passed, today I received an email from their Artist and Label Relations representative, Dries Nys. In his email, Nys said he was looking for the rights holders of the old Mille Plateaux record label, and specifically the album I had just asked them to remove, Institutional Collaborative. Apparently they are an actual business.

Revibed's business model seems to revolve around the question of how to make illegal music download sites appear more professional. Those familiar with my work hopefully understand that my using a term like "illegal" is not a cry for more policing. Nor is my calling out blatant corporate profiteering motivated by concerns about personal financial loss, since I am sure sales of my releases never amount to much. Rather, I am speaking of the hypocrisies within corporate cultures that claim to operate through bureaucracy and regulations in the name of protecting individuals such as artists, when in fact their rules define the terms of our exploitation. Our actual needs and concerns are strategically omitted from their policies because incorporating them would interfere with business narratives of perpetual growth and profits.

If we read between the altruistic-sounding lines in Revibed’s mission statement about preserving musical heritage, it is not difficult to understand they are actually in the practice of uploading and selling whatever they feel like without the consent of the original artists or rights holders. Of course, this also means they keep all profits to themselves. They reduce the odds of being caught by focusing on older releases that appear to have no active digital rights holders attempting to distribute or sell the works online, reducing the likelihood of content matches and copyright claims from active content rights holders or digital aggregators.

For those of you who have followed my struggles with people selling the Mille Plateaux back catalog without authorization, Revibed approaching me with an offer to distribute works I just asked them to take down might sound familiar. If you recall, from the year 2003 until 2009, iTunes, Juno Download and other major online distributors sold my entire Mille Plateaux back catalog without authorization nor payment. After a multi-year struggle to get them to remove the works, they then turned around and offered me distribution contracts they described as identical to the ones they used with the unauthorized person they had been paying for the past six years. No apologies for their six years of ignoring my removal requests. And of course, no mention of back revenues. As you can imagine, with absolutely no ability to trust their business practices, I told them all to fuck off. I later found out that other former Mille Plateaux artists were experiencing the same problem. Then, one year later in 2010, the entire back catalog of Mille Plateaux was again being sold without authorization, this time by Beatport. Upon discovering this, I wrote an open letter to the press that thankfully managed to get enough attention for Beatport to take down the files within one week.

While some people mistake my continued aversion to digital distribution for some kind of artistic gesture, it is actually grounded in those material experiences that robbed me of any ability to trust the major players in online distribution. Actually, as a digital media producer, I originally had high hopes about changing to online distribution. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by the reality of corrupt industry practices. I have tried several times to develop a private system for secure downloads, but the back-end server costs always made it prohibitive when compared to my potential sales. While I have miraculously managed to maintain a career without digital distribution, it is not the result of some stoic attempt to preserve physical media. My current practices are a direct result of my eyes being forced open by major digital distributors, their actions making it impossible to work with them. While I have no regrets about my decisions, there is no denying that those experiences forced my work down an unexpected and difficult path, both culturally and economically.

Over the past two decades I have attempted to document and share the strategies of non-cooperation and smallness that have sustained me. They are not fixed, and change greatly with experience - sometimes in contradictory ways. They are directed by an ever-increasing understanding of the incongruities between mainstream, populist distribution systems and "underground" media production. In recent years, the gap between these cultural sites has widened exponentially through rapid globalization, and increased social pressure to participate in systems of surveillance and information control. Analyzing these cultural conditions and identifying the social mechanisms behind them has become a core aspect of my attempts to keep culturally critical media functioning queerly.

Simultaneous to this dive into offline digital culture (what some might erroneously call a cultural retreat), I have always done my best to keep my work readily available in the most simple ways possible outside of those digital distribution networks. Like many independent producers, I manufacture and maintain physical inventory at home. I personally process, pack and internationally ship orders alone. With all of the various CD compilations I have released on Comatonse Recordings over the past few years, almost all of my out-of-print vinyl back catalog is now available in a high resolution format that is identical to the original master recordings. As a fan service experiment, for releases that have physically sold out but lack enough public interest to make a repress financially viable, I have even made the tremendous compromise of making them digitally available via Bandcamp - which is not a site I otherwise use or endorse.

Despite all these efforts to keep my catalog obtainable, I still regularly hear people angrily accuse me of being a "gatekeeper" of genres and subcultures. This always baffles me, since I am just one person who doesn't manage anyone's projects other than my own. It goes without saying that word is usually invoked by people attempting to publicly justify their uploads. In actuality, the real gatekeepers - those who most control and facilitate the flow of culture - are the corporations, their faithful employees, and their unquestioning registered end users. Of course, this logic will forever be lost on the majority of people who unwittingly lean into their own dominant cultural brainwashing. This is why I will always find my work placed online by others, invariably for purposes of monetization despite initial claims of philanthropic "sharing." (I have lost count of how many times people have literally threatened me for having YouTube remove their upload, initially claiming they were just trying to share tracks by me and others with a wider audience, only to reveal in the end they were actually upset because their account monetized the removed content.) So I am not a gatekeeper. In the hierarchy of social relations, I am not the one with the most power. I am just another pawn who will never overcome dominant powers. The proof of this rests in my constantly demonstrating an inability to control the flow of my work, or prevent it from being uploaded by even the most random of unrelated persons. The best I can do - any of us can do - is to perpetually complicate and minimize our cooperation with those who attempt to force our participation and compliance. That’s all there is.

While I try to make the best decisions for my own work within an impossible situation, and will always criticize the exploitative hypocrisies of major industry practices (as well as try and be open about the unavoidable hypocrisies in my own practices that arise simply by working in response to their hypocrisies), I have never claimed to have the answers or be able to show the way. I have encouraged people to try and understand and share in my non-cooperation if they wish, but I have never attempted to dictate the actions of others or force them to emulate me. Yes, when people order from me I will directly request that they refrain from uploading, and provide a link they can click on to learn more about how my position is not the usual claptrap about property rights and lost profits. But from there, what they do is always beyond my control. And yes, when I find my works in corporate archives such as YouTube or Spotify, I will attempt to have them removed. Those companies require me to issue a DCMA removal request based on copyright enforcement, which is also beyond my control and not at the heart of my cultural interests in keeping my works out of their inherently anti-social profit engines. But neither of these actions on my part are attempts to change the world. They are bare minimum reactions to an uncontrollable world imposed upon me.

So here I am once again, faced with yet another online distributor whose greed and hypocrisy has already been demonstrated through my first interaction with them (i.e., randomly discovering their unauthorized sale of my works and having to ask them to remove them), followed by a request to get those same works back into their profit engine, along with the rest of the Mille Plateaux back catalog. Finally, a company that has the red, pendulous, inflamed, pungent, flaking, pustule covered, syphilitic balls to proclaim they are here to act globally in deciding how our musical histories are to be preserved, and change a corrupt music industry for the common good. What a blessing that the strategy we've all been waiting for someone to come up with just so happens to be a plug-and-play online business model that same corrupt music industry has been using all along. Revibed is doing it all for you and me, people. Halleluja.

This is the response I sent them:

May 2, 2024

Re: Looking for the rights owner of Jane Dowe, Terre Thaemlitz - Institutional Collaborative

Dries Nys,

This letter is a formal refusal to ever have any of my works carried by your website, including the collaborative album with Jane Dowe, Institutional Collaborative. I am sure you are aware of my first interaction with Revibed a few weeks ago, in which I had to ask you to remove that album and another work of mine being sold without authorization. Based on that experience, I have zero faith in your business ethics. I can only conclude Revibed is less about audio preservation and more about simply trying to sell things you do not see online elsewhere without authorization, keeping all profits for yourselves, because you think the actual producers and rights holders are not paying attention to them. It seems you only attempt to formally license works after being caught selling them out of license. My answer is a definitive no.

With regard to the original Mille Plateaux back catalog (by which I presume you are referring to releases up to their bankruptcy in 2003), based on their standard contract all rights have returned to the original artists. (This would also apply to releases on the parent label Force Inc., and their other sublabels.) Importantly, the standard contract always specified a term limit, as well as physical formats for release (generally CD and vinyl). To the best of my knowledge, at no point did the label receive digital distribution rights from any artists. Furthermore, after their bankruptcy, only the rights to the label name were sold with no inclusion of rights of any kind for the back catalog itself. As you may or may not be aware, this catalog has been maliciously exploited multiple times over the years, including by post-bankruptcy owners of the label name who misrepresented themselves as having rights to the back catalog, as well as major online distributors. It has been a long and traumatic experience for many of the artists involved. Anyone claiming to represent the label Mille Plateaux who says they also control the back catalog should be required to produce valid contracts for the specific works they claim to represent.

I ask you to once again review your database and ensure you are not selling any of my works, including tracks in compilations, collaborative works, etc. This extends to all of my aliases, including but not limited to DJ Sprinkles, G.R.R.L., K-S.H.E (Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion), Social Material, Teriko, and Terre's Neu Wuss Fusion. If technically possible, formally flag their exclusion from your database so that I will not have to deal with further removal requests or other interactions with Revibed in the future.

- Terre Thaemlitz

Prediction: At some point in the future I will once again find my work being sold without permission on Revibed.

Update: May 4, 2024

Today I received a boilerplate reply from "the Revibed team" stating they regret my conclusion about their project, blah, blah, blah, they asked their technical team to exclude my aliases listed on Discogs, blah, blah, blah, regarding the old Mille Plateaux catalog, they will make sure to only deal with artists, blah, blah, blah, kind regards, blah, blah, blah.

Just as with iTunes, Juno and the rest, there is no apology. No explaination as to why they were selling my releases without permission in the first place, or for how long. Absolutely no report of what their sales were. No challenge to my conclusion about their project. Without engaging any of those topics, it's all just business hand-job stroking bullshit. None of their courteous gesturing and dancing around has any meaning after the fact that they were already caught selling my stuff, and are surely still selling releases by others without permission. I reckon the young'uns would call it gaslighting.

This pattern is so old and exhausting. My previous prediction still stands.