The Strangest Thing...

 

I was scrolling through my YouTube feed when I came across the video on the center left of the screen shot above. It proved to be an "album" of piano pieces by a Japanese composer/pianist, Yuriko Nakamura. Some music on YouTube Music also appears on You Tube channels and vise vera, and this is an example of that; a song with just a static version of the cover. I clicked on the video and found this;

The only reason I believe it appeared on my feed, was that I had been listening to some eastern music during my morning writing session on YouTube music. Which just goes to show you how much "they"  know about you and what you're up to, at least on the web.

And from there I went to the home page of the musician, and found this;

So why the curiosity?

It was the fact that the cover art for this collection of piano pieces is one of my paintings. Indeed the two covers on the left of the home page above are both my paintings. One is Upland Road in Winter which you can find HERE. The second one, Woods Along the Harniss Road you can view HERE.

Let me tell you, it is very strange experience to find your work as an the cover art of a Japanese new age-ish musician while scrolling through videos on YouTube. And rather cool as well.

The paintings were likely found on and downloaded from my DeviantArt gallery. It's a place where a lot of people go looking for art they can use. I don't watermark my paintings, and have no problem with people downloading them for their own use and enjoyment.

While I release all my work under a Creative Commons License, that license does require that if used, I be credited as the artist, and that it should not be used for commercial purposes without my permission. And since I was neither credited, nor was my permission sought to use it, and these videos and songs are commercial ventures for the benefit of, I presume, Yuriko, the use of my art is clearly not in accordance to the CC license. Hmmm...

Looking into the matter further, it appears that the music, along with the cover art, was uploaded to YouTube by Distrokid, a company that operates something like D2D, in that musicians use it to upload their work to music apps like YouTube and Spotify, whose Yuriko Nakamura page on Spotify is below also has my artwork for those albums.

From what I could find on the Distrokid site, the person uploading the music would also need to provide the cover art just like self-publishing authors do. Now I don't know who uploaded this music, whether it was Yuriko herself, or someone else, but in any event, I doubt I would have any easy way to reach out to them and at least request credit as the artist.

I suppose there could be some remedy for this, I could file a complaint with YouTube or some such thing, but I have no interest in pursuing anything like that. Why bother? Its use costs me nothing, and displays my work. Besides, I'm rather flattered that someone would choose my art for their album cover. Though I don't know exactly why they chose those particular ones, since I didn't see any title the paintings would apply to.

Besides, I am perfectly aware, and have been from the very beginning, that if you convert your analog work to digital and upload it to the internet, you have conceded control of it. Its use is out of your control, and there is no point losing sleep over that fact. I suppose, if you are trying to make money from your work, you might be tempted to try to find and put out all the little fires of piracy sites, but it is largely a futile effort. You'd best just look on it as free advertising.

So there you go, an illustration of how connected we are. Weirdly connected.

Strangely enough, I just used the Harniss Road piece for a recent posting myself.