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\n\tIn the past few weeks, rap fans have celebrated legendary mixtapes from Lil Wayne<\/a> and Rick Ross<\/a> being uploaded to streaming<\/a> platforms, but their time on these services may be cut short. A source close to Wayne told Rolling Stone<\/em> that his Dedication<\/em> and Da Drought<\/em> mixtapes, recently removed from Tidal and Apple Music, were \u201cnot legal [or] legitimate uploads,\u201d even though they were on his official artist pages. (Reps for Tidal and Apple Music did not respond to requests for comment.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThese uploads reflect potential flaws in the process of adding music to Digital Service Providers (DSPs). Streaming services like Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify require artists to utilize third-party music distributors such as Distrokid, TuneCore, and RouteNote to upload music to their platforms. However, the scale of music regularly uploaded to self-service distributors means anyone can upload a song or album without official rights, attribute it to any artist they choose, and sometimes have these uploads slip through regulation onto artists\u2019 official pages.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tCoach Bombay 3000<\/a>, a Brooklyn music manager for rapper Rome Streetz<\/a> and several other acts, believes that it\u2019s \u201cpretty easy\u201d for anyone to upload music to digital music distributors and have it appear on an artist\u2019s official page. \u201cThere\u2019s been times where there\u2019s so much shit that says Rome Streetz [and] we never uploaded [it],\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re like, \u2018Who the fuck is this?\u2019 We got to issue strikes to get it taken down.\u201d Bombay says he\u2019s dealt with people trying to upload music to Rome\u2019s streaming pages \u201cthree times\u201d in the last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHe explains that when people use one of the digital music distributors, they can type Rome Streetz or Lil Wayne in the \u201cprimary artist\u201d category of the upload form, add a link to the URL of the official artist page on the streaming service, and have a chance of the music bypassing quality control functions. He says that once the music is uploaded to streaming providers, his team has to ask the official distributor (an independent distributor or record label) to issue a takedown notice, which can take days. In the case of Wayne, it took almost a week for his mixtapes to be removed from Apple Music and Tidal.\u00a0<\/p>\n