You know, sometimes you just have to admit that you were wrong, and that you got played and that is how I feel about my music and my catalog you see, as an independent artist that's also running an independent label, you try to use all of tools you can that are at your disposal and one of those was to enter the streaming world so we all talked about it in the We Rise camp and decided to make that move so after selling our mixtapes independently at shows and to the public we thought why not try putting albums together and releasing them online this was back in 2008 and I didn't pay too much attention to streaming I was busy pushing Cd's so I did some research talked to the family and I got the blessing to go through with it so in 2009 I choose an unnamed online music distributer and away we went now in the beginning I didn't know anything about curating playlists so I went to work making playlists on all of the streaming platforms and social media sites making sure that We Rise music was well represented and we started building our online following and started building a name for ourselves that is until we started looking at the numbers and what the payouts were I mean, a stream isn't even worth a whole penny and as independent artists you have no say so in what category that your music is placed in there were many times that I have corresponded with my distributor and the streaming services about these issues and never have I received real answer and while it was frustrating it just fueled me to make sure that our presence was known so I worked hard on our following and yet still our music was misplaced and disrespected we never asked for help just don't try and tear down our reputation the final blow was being accused of using an artificial streaming company to inflate our numbers and to what means, the money that we have made from streams over the past 15 years is not enough to retire from believe me, so that argument missed me and you think that our distributor that we have been doing business with for almost 20 years would defend us against these accusations nope, they rolled right over and pulled our catalog as if that was going to stop us it only drives me that why our website is up and running and we have our music where our real fans can listen to for free or purchase it doing for self is something that I pride myself on, back to the basics is the only way to go we will rise regardless of any situation motivation is the driving force for what we do and no one will stop the rise and that's for life stay tuned.