Most on-line services that sell or stream music try to have a page for each artist where that artist’s discography is represented and you can easily find all the artist’s work from one easy jumping-off point. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work all that well because of situations like mine. First of all, I have the same name as a famous deceased politician, many of whose speeches and interviews exist as sound recordings. So even though the famous Robert Francis Kennedy wasn’t a musician as far as I know, you can search for me on many music sites and find recordings of him. Making matters a bit worse, there is another not-so-famous Robert Kennedy who is a musician and who has released a couple of EPs. Especially because some sites file some of our music together on the same artist page, it’s very easy on some music sites to get the impression that he and I are one and the same, but we aren’t. I’m trying to get those artist pages corrected where I’ve found that problem, but it can be an uphill battle.

Additional confusion comes from the fact that I released Big Shoes in 2015 as the Robert Kennedy Trio, and in 2018 I released Closer to Home as simply Robert Kennedy (mainly because it has some quartet tracks and some trio tracks).

Just for fun, below are links to all the artist pages I know about that actually represent my music. (Still a work in progress; the below info is incomplete.)

Visit Robert Kennedy on Bandcamp where you can purchase CDs, digital downloads, and streaming. Because Bandcamp gives the artist pretty thorough control over how their music is organized, it’s pretty much the only vendor site where my artist presence and my material completely make sense without anything weird.

After several iterations with the Google Play Music support folks, I am happy to report that my artist page on Google Play Music is correct now. One challenge for music services is that there’s another musician named Robert Kennedy who isn’t me.

On CD Baby I currently have a bifurcated identity: You can visit Robert Kennedy on CD Baby to purchase Closer to Home there, and you can visit Robert Kennedy Trio on CD Baby to purchase Big Shoes there; both are available as CDs and digital downloads.

On Pandora, I have the same bifurcated identity situation: I am both the Robert Kennedy Trio and Robert Kennedy.

On iTunes, like on CD Baby and Pandora, I have a bifurcated identity. Things used to be messed up worse than just that on iTunes, where my work was mixed with another Robert Kennedy’s. But now it seems better organized, thanks to their response to my submitting an “artist separation request.” You can visit The Robert Kennedy Trio on the iTunes Store where you can find Big Shoes and purchase digital downloads or stream on Apple Music. You’ll notice Closer to Home isn’t on that page, and that’s because Closer to Home is by Robert Kennedy, not the Robert Kennedy Trio. Closer to Home, then, appears on the Robert Kennedy artist page. Before they handled my artist separation request, Closer to Home appeared on another Robert Kennedy artist page, which contains at least three albums that are the work of another Robert Kennedy.

Spotify had basically the same problem as iTunes, and as with iTunes, an artist separation request took care of the mingling of my work with another musician’s. Now there are two different pages pertaining to my work here and here, while the page here contains work by another artist named Robert Kennedy (and used to contain Closer to Home as well).

Amazon is an interesting situation, even more complicated than the others. Depending on CGI arguments in the URL, you can see an artist page where digital downloads of Big Shoes are credited to Robert Kennedy Trio or (with different CGI arguments, or none) you can see a very similar artist page where physical CDs of Big Shoes are strangely credited to Robert Kennedy. Notice that neither of those pages shows Closer to Home; apparently the “Robert Kennedy” who made Closer to Home has no artist page at all on Amazon; I’m currently unsure how to begin getting that fixed. Closer to Home is available on Amazon as both physical copies and MP3 downloads however, but the two product pages are not quite correctly linked together as different formats of the same work like they’re supposed to be (and they once were!). Furthermore, Amazon seems recently to have created a duplicate product page for the physical CD which is correctly linked from the MP3 download product page, but contains a bunch of wrong info. Problems include:

• Closer to Home currently shows streaming and MP3 download options in Amazon Music, but that page contains a link to the Audio CD page which is missing the “AutoRip” option. That’s all good, but there is a different, older product page for the physical CD, and it used to show up in search results but now it no longer does. Furthermore, it, too, has always been missing the “AutoRip” option. Many other problems with these pages have gotten fixed over time, but as I’ve also seen, Amazon tends to mess with parts of the setup that are already correct, sometimes breaking them in new and different ways.
• Big Shoes MP3 and streaming are here with the correct album cover image shown, yet if you click on the Audio CD format, you wind up here, where the cover art is rendered badly. There is also another page here where CD Baby started trying to sell just-in-time duplicated copies of Big Shoes until I asked them to stop because I was already selling genuine replicated copies through them. That was a bizarre situation, discussed more in a Facebook posting I wrote (and its comment thread).

musicbrainz.org is an amazing, super nerdy site that does a fantastic job of representing the complex relationships among musicians and the music we create. A good starting point for its info about me is my Relationships page.

allmusic.com knows about Big Shoes and Closer to Home, and shows correct credits for them. It took quite a while for the complete information for Closer to Home to appear on their site, and even after it was mostly complete, for a while they misattributed Bill Bell’s tune “Wild Bill” from Closer to Home to the more famous William Bell who wrote “Born Under a Bad Sign” and other tunes you’ve probably heard. It’s all correct as of May, 2019, though!

allaboutjazz.com has a page for me which is accurate except for the youtube link that just does a generic search for “Robert Kennedy” and therefore turns up a bunch of videos about the famous deceased politician. There are also pages for Closer to Home and Big Shoes, neither of which has much content currently.