Spotify removes all R. Kelly's music from their editorial playlists

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Spotify Removes All R. Kelly Songs From Their Playlists

The public expulsion of R. Kelly is another day closer to coming to fruition.

According to Billboard, Spotify has removed all of Robert’s tunes from their playlists that were created either via algorithm or editorially.

The company is enforcing a new public hate content and hateful conduct policy:

“We are removing R. Kelly’s music from all Spotify owned and operated playlists and algorithmic recommendations such as Discover Weekly,” Spotify told Billboard in a statement. “His music will still be available on the service, but Spotify will not actively promote it. We don’t censor content because of an artist’s or creator’s behavior, but we want our editorial decisions — what we choose to program — to reflect our values. When an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful, it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator.”

Vice President/Head of Content, Jonathan Price, had this to say more specifically about streeping eweh di powah of R. Kelly’s streams:

“When we look at promotion, we look at issues around hateful conduct, where you have an artist or another creator who has done something off-platform that is so particularly out of line with our values, egregious, in a way that it becomes something that we don’t want to associate ourselves with,” Jonathan Prince, Spotify’s vp/head of content and marketplace policy, tells Billboard. “So we’ve decided that in some circumstances, we may choose to not work with that artist or their content in the same way — to not program it, to not playlist it, to not do artist marketing campaigns with that artist.”

What exactly is the crux of this new public safety policy? Well…

“Hate content is content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability,” the policy reads. “When we are alerted to content that violates our policy, we may remove it (in consultation with rights holders) or refrain from promoting or manually programming it on our service.”

We can only assume that they are viewing Kelly’s sexually-charged music through the “art-imitates-life” lens to qualify him for removal.

Despite how embarrassingly long it’s taken, it looks like we are finally witnessing the end of R. Kelly’s music career.