Logo

TVWeek, CNBC

Spotify Says It Will No Longer ‘Play Judge and Jury’

Jun 1, 2018  •  Post A Comment

The music mega-site Spotify is abandoning a policy that the streaming service says has it playing “judge and jury” in cases involving artists’ behavior. The streamer announced the policy change today in a web post.

The change involves rolling back a recently announced policy concerning hate content and conduct. “While we believe our intentions were good, the language was too vague, we created confusion and concern, and didn’t spend enough time getting input from our own team and key partners before sharing new guidelines,” the streamer said.

The new statement adds: “Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct.”

CNBC reports that the policy was responsible for getting R&B artist R. Kelly booted from Spotify on May 10 in response to allegations of sexual assault.

The new spotify statement adds: “The second part of our policy addressed hate content. Spotify does not permit content whose principal purpose is to incite hatred or violence against people because of their race, religion, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation. As we’ve done before, we will remove content that violates that standard. We’re not talking about offensive, explicit, or vulgar content — we’re talking about hate speech.”

You can click here to read the full statement from Spotify.

One Comment

  1. Boy, that really clarifies their policy.

Leave a Reply to Sceptical Observer Cancel Reply

Email (will not be published)