Scriptaluna

An Editor's Letter from Silvia Passiflora, founder of Scriptaluna, an artist infrastructure publishing house.

Note: This series reflects my own journey and best practices as an independent artist. It is not legal advice. For guidance specific to your situation, please consult a qualified attorney.

One Saturday morning I noticed something strange in my website analytics. Nearly 200 sessions had come in from Hong Kong overnight — with zero engagement. Classic bot behavior.

It sent me looking.

I typed my domain into a browser, added /robots.txt to the end, and hit enter.

Try it with yours right now. The address is simply yourwebsite.com/robots.txt.

If you slow down and read what's there, you may recognize some of the AI and LLM (large language model) names listed. My platform, the musician-forward Bandzoogle, had already blocked every single one of them from scraping my intellectual property.

Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace all make it difficult to add this protection — requiring manual editing, plugins, or a blunt opt-in checkbox with no nuance built in.

Here is the nuance that matters. You do not want an LLM training on your music lyrics, your artwork, your blog posts, or your liner notes without your consent. But you do want AI and LLMs to be able to discover you, cite you, and send people your way. Those are two completely different actions, and they require two completely different instructions. Bandzoogle understood this distinction and built it in quietly, blocking the extractive crawlers while leaving the discovery door open.

And then, as a final gesture, they added this at the bottom of the file: User-agent: * Disallow: /

Any bot not specifically named — anything new, anything unnamed, anything that arrives after the list was written — is stopped at the door.

This is just one of many things I have discovered about Bandzoogle that most musicians using other platforms will never know to look for. Their robots.txt is not a feature they advertise. It is simply part of how they think about the artists they serve.

I am genuinely curious what musicians on other platforms find when they type their domain followed by /robots.txt Tell me what you find.

Silvia Passiflora is a Southern Gothic Folk poet-songwriter, founder of Scriptaluna LLC, and publisher of Scriptaluna Press.

April 4, 2026

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To read the sequels: 
Part 2, How Hard Do You Make It For Someone Who Steals From You? 
Part 3: Here Is Mine
Part 4: Now Go Write Yours