Spotify announced today that the platform is “moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct.” That policy—the
Hate Content & Hateful Conduct Policy, revealed just a few weeks ago—
led to the removal of XXXTentacion and R. Kelly’s music from its editorial and algorithmic playlists. With today’s news, X’s “SAD!” has been added back to the popular RapCaviar playlist.
Last week,
Bloomberg reported that
representatives for multiple acts—including Kendrick Lamar—reached out to Spotify Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek and head of artist relations Troy Carter and threatened to pull their music if the company kept the policy as it stood. In an interview with
Billboard, Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment, has now confirmed that he threatened to remove music from the service.
“I reached out to Troy over there, we had a conversation and I expressed how I felt about it, about censorship, how you can’t do artists that way,” Tiffith told
Billboard. “I don’t think it’s right for artists to be censored, especially in our culture.
How did they just pick those [artists] out? How come they didn’t pick out any others from any other genres or any other different cultures? There [are] so many other artists that have different things going on, and they could’ve picked anybody. But it seems to me that they’re constantly picking on hip-hop culture.”