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Why some people still call Revibed “piracy”, and why that says more about them than about us
Revibed Editorial Team
Revibed Weekly
Hi everyone,
It began with a comment on Dark Male - Night Life. A user suggested that people did not need to support the preorder because the music could be found on a pirate P2P network.
We removed the comment.
We removed it because promoting pirate sources on Revibed is a very simple line for us.
Revibed exists to do the opposite.
The exchange went like this.
Revibed admin:
Your comment on Dark Male - Night Life was deleted. Please avoid promoting pirate P2Ps on Revibed.
User:
How do you define a “pirate P2P”? How does Revibed distinguish itself from those?
Revibed admin:
With a second warning, you will be blocked and removed from Revibed.
User:
Ok, thanks for notifying me. Could you please answer the questions so we can have a human interaction?
Revibed admin:
Of course. Happy to make it human.
By “pirate P2P”, we mean places where music is shared without permission from the rights holders, with no licensing, no reporting, no payments, and no relationship with the people who actually made or own the music.
Revibed is the opposite of that.
We are building a pathfinder platform in a part of music culture where almost nobody has done the hard work properly before: forgotten, under-reissued, pre-digital, or poorly digitised records that still have cultural value and demand, but have fallen out of normal circulation.
So far, hundreds of artists and rights holders have signed with Revibed, tens of thousands of dollars have been paid out, and thousands of releases have been restored, documented, cleared, and brought back into circulation instead of being left to disappear into dead links, bad rips, private folders, and collector mythology.
So the comparison with piracy is, frankly, a strange one.
Piracy takes music without asking.
Revibed identifies demand, looks for rights holders, negotiates with them, signs agreements when they want to work with us, pays them, restores and presents the music properly, and closes or removes projects when a rights holder does not want to participate.
That is not piracy. That is rights work, archive work, and cultural recovery.
But since you are asking the question so confidently, maybe you can help us understand your logic: can you name one artist who refused to work with Revibed and was not paid what was owed? Or one artist who agreed to work with Revibed and was not signed? Or one case where we knowingly treated an artist like a pirate P2P would?
We are always open to criticism, but it has to be based on something real.
User:
Thank you so much for explaining all of that. I agree, and that is why my opinion on KollektivX, now Revibed, has changed over the past years.
I will not be able to answer your questions, since I did not discuss more with people on Instagram who are hating Revibed and saying “CANCEL REVIBED”.
Maybe you should not only communicate via emails to the Revibed community about all these questions, but also on your Instagram page, and show clearly to the haters that you are clean with the artists, which was not clear at all during the KollektivX era.
Because some people in electronic music-sharing communities blocked me on Instagram just because they saw that I was creating projects on Revibed. They still have this idea in mind that you are robbing artists.
And it is hard to change their minds if they know about an example of some artist who did not know his or her music was being sold without him or her knowing. But as you explained, it cannot be the case now.
Revibed admin:
Thank you for saying this, and honestly, we appreciate the fact that you are bringing it up directly instead of just repeating slogans from the outside.
We are very aware of this situation, and in a way we see it as natural. As you correctly noticed, a lot of the loudest noise comes from pirate-sharing communities, or from people very close to that culture.
Revibed is, quite literally, stepping on their tail, because the more music we bring back legally, the less comfortable the old “private sharing, Soulseek, secret folders, nobody gets paid” ecosystem becomes.
And this is where the irony is hard to miss.
If these people were genuinely concerned about music and artists, they would also talk about the catalogues we have signed, the hundreds of artists and rights holders we have found and brought into direct relationships, the tens of thousands of dollars already paid, and the thousands of releases that have been rescued from disappearing or staying trapped in bad rips and private collections.
But they usually do not talk about that.
They do not stop exchanging music illegally. They do not help us find rights holders. They do not ask how many artists have finally received money from forgotten catalogues. They do not discuss the releases that were removed or closed when a rights holder did not want to participate.
They mostly perform outrage, feed each other’s egos, and play the same little online games.
So yes, we know some people still carry an old image of KollektivX in their heads. We also understand that in the early days not everything was communicated clearly enough. That is part of the history, and we are not pretending otherwise.
But Revibed today is a very different project.
Right now, we are preparing for a new era of Revibed, including our move into streaming. And there, the agenda will not be shaped by anonymous haters or forum noise, but by the artists we have found, the rights holders we work with, and the selectors who understand the cultural value of this music.
We are going to offer things the music world has not really seen before: a platform built around forgotten and under-reissued music, transparent listening data for artists, direct access between artists and their listeners, and a rights-first model that is much clearer than the black box most artists face on mainstream streaming platforms.
That will speak much louder than any online shouting match, which usually ends exactly where it started: in drama, suspicion, and nothing useful for the music itself.
Revibed is, quite literally, stepping on their tail, because the more music we bring back legally, the less comfortable the old “private sharing, Soulseek, secret folders, nobody gets paid” ecosystem becomes.
And this is where the irony is hard to miss.
If these people were genuinely concerned about music and artists, they would also talk about the catalogues we have signed, the hundreds of artists and rights holders we have found and brought into direct relationships, the tens of thousands of dollars already paid, and the thousands of releases that have been rescued from disappearing or staying trapped in bad rips and private collections.
But they usually do not talk about that.
They do not stop exchanging music illegally. They do not help us find rights holders. They do not ask how many artists have finally received money from forgotten catalogues. They do not discuss the releases that were removed or closed when a rights holder did not want to participate.
They mostly perform outrage, feed each other’s egos, and play the same little online games.
So yes, we know some people still carry an old image of KollektivX in their heads. We also understand that in the early days not everything was communicated clearly enough. That is part of the history, and we are not pretending otherwise.
But Revibed today is a very different project.
Right now, we are preparing for a new era of Revibed, including our move into streaming. And there, the agenda will not be shaped by anonymous haters or forum noise, but by the artists we have found, the rights holders we work with, and the selectors who understand the cultural value of this music.
We are going to offer things the music world has not really seen before: a platform built around forgotten and under-reissued music, transparent listening data for artists, direct access between artists and their listeners, and a rights-first model that is much clearer than the black box most artists face on mainstream streaming platforms.
That will speak much louder than any online shouting match, which usually ends exactly where it started: in drama, suspicion, and nothing useful for the music itself.
********************
Warmly,
The Revibed Team
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