Hey, hi, hello, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd.

Let's talk about Shopify. I know the first 30 seconds of this video is going to sound like an ad, but hear me out.

Currently, with bands and solo musicians, selling merchandise, shirts, or whatever is one of the best guarantees of making some money off of your work, especially with physical sales, dwindling, and streaming services paying next to nothing right now.

Yeah, one of the best ways to make a buck is to generate some merch off of what you do and sell that to your most loyal fans. However, artists are still effed on some level, even on this front. Even for signed artists, we currently live in an age where these people are navigating their careers with less support and fewer resources than ever.

I mean, this current paradigm is often portrayed as an era of artistic freedom, when in actuality, it's more like, 'Hey, you go figure it out on your own.' Which is why there is an entire cottage industry of platforms and businesses and services now that essentially take creators from point A to point B, whether they are trying to get their music uploaded to a streaming platform or sell some shirts and tchotchkes.

That's not only where Shopify comes in, but also Kanye West, who's a recent spirals into anti-Semitism and pure insanity. We have been documenting on this channel pretty closely, yeah. I wasn't exactly excited to discuss this as a topic yet again so soon on this channel, but I feel like recent developments in terms of his behavior have really highlighted something weird going on with Shopify.

Now, a few things we have not covered recently that have gone on with Kanye West is, apparently, his management dropped him, which is amazing because at this point, I had no idea that he even had management or anybody telling him what he should or should not be doing. He's also been beefing with music executive Lyor Cohen on social media, specifically on Instagram, too, doing his best to defend the thing that we are about to talk about here.

It should be mentioned that Vulture no. 2, Ty Dolla $ign, finally made some post on Instagram that indicated possibly a separation away from Kanye. "I don't condone any form of hate speech against anybody." As if Kanye was not a self-described Nazi prior to the first Vultures album, but whatever.

This behavior gets even more confusing, considering that very recently, Ty promoted a song he did with Kanye, and I think he's still promoting it. But what rings just as hollow is Shopify's response to Kanye using a swastika for a T-shirt he was selling on their platform. This shirt was the loan item being sold for $20, I understand, on Kanye's site, which he actually took out a Super Bowl ad, of all things, to promote.

So yeah, Kanye, goofy iPhone video, the decked-out teeth are in his mouth. He's sounding like an idiot. He's telling people to go to yeezy.com, where essentially, they're going to be confronted with a swastika t-shirt that they can purchase. And apparently, whatever sales were made of this t-shirt were powered by Shopify.

Now look, when it comes to Kanye West at this moment, nothing really surprises me. I don't know if there's really anything else to say about what he's doing and the messages of hate and the hate symbolism he's spreading. But for a reputable multibillion-dollar company like Shopify, you'd figure this situation, this issue, would be a no-brainer. One of the most polarizing public figures on the planet is going on a series of anti-Semitic tirades and selling a swastika shirt using your platform, seems obvious that you would just want to take that down on principle of that behavior being horrible.

But no, not only did Shopify leave this page functional for quite a while. Afterwards, when it was eventually taken down, the platform, provably, was hiding replies on Twitter of people bringing this issue to their attention. According to the logic, they have made statements to employees instructing them to not say anything about the Kanye Nazi t-shirt situation.

When they did say something about the removal of this shirt and Kanye Shopify page, they cited it was because of the likelihood of fraud, some vague fraudulent activity that we can't quite define or put a finger on what it is or how it's being facilitated.So I guess we're essentially getting the go ahead to sell swastika t-shirts as long as we're doing it on the up and up, and all sales of these shirts are moral and righteous, and nobody's getting scammed.

Unfortunately, Shopify failing the the most obvious test right now. Don't let this guy openly sell swastika shirts on your platform. I mean, why that's a bad idea should be self-evident. But also on top of it, as people were reacting to this story and doing a bit of digging, they found out that Kanye is not the only person selling hateful garbage merch on the Shopify platform. As individuals like Matt Walsh, as well as Libs of TikTok apparently use Shopify to do business and their entire brands are built off of just hating and demonizing and monetizing bigotry against the LGBTQ community.

As it also turns out, the COO of the company is, in fact, the director of a Canadian far-right media outlet, too. So I guess this whole selling fascist merch on your platform is just par for the course and totally fine on Shopify, save for any fraud that might go on because apparently there's some actual ideological alignment there.

Another major disappointment, again, especially given just how popular Shopify has proven to be in the creator community, in the music community, when it comes to getting shirts or whatever artists and creators want to generate for their fans. So, yeah, I'm going to leave it there.

Anthony Fantano. Forever.