Spotify's announcement that they're taking R. Kelly's music off their curated and algorithmically generated playlists (amongst other artists) is big news when it comes to large corporations grappling with the responsibility of curation (curation is, of course, Digg's bread and butter). What does this decision mean for Spotify's influence on the music industry moving forward? Digg editors Mat and Ben discuss:



Mat: Hey Ben! So, as Digg editors our job is to curate the best stuff from around the web. Often in Slack we have conversations about what should and shouldn't go on the page, and we're not alone in that. We are far from the only curation hub on the internet, and compared to a giant like Spotify, we're super tiny.

How do you feel about seeing this Spotify news from the outside, as someone whose day job is to have curatorial decisions on your mind all the time?

Ben: I empathize with Spotify curators. Like you said, we tackle those questions all the time. For instance, when the news broke the Nautilus wasn't paying their freelancers on time, we grappled with whether or not we wanted to link to their stories. That decision has a very different impact than Spotify's decision not to host certain artists' music. The size of Spotify leads to an outsized effect on the artists they're censoring, if you want to call it censoring.

Mat: In the one sense, there's the aspect that they aren't really eliminating R. Kelly or other artists from their platform at all. As a platform, Spotify is still home to R. Kelly, XXXTentacion and all these other artists who they've apparently quietly removed from Spotify-made playlists in recent months. The R. Kelly decision is just the one they've decided to get out ahead of in the news cycle.

For us, when we are linking out to somebody's article, we're making a value judgment there in saying "this is worth reading," but with Spotify they're directly getting money from a play. As a platform, they seem reticent to make any value judgments, but perhaps the curators at Spotify behind these playlists are coming to grips with their responsibility. I also empathize with them, but I wonder how it clashes with Spotify's core business, where the sell is "you can find all the music you want here."

Ben: It's interesting because, I think in terms of methodology they're going about this problem in the correct way. They're acknowledging that they're part of a platform and not independent from that, but they're removing these artists from curated playlists. To me it gets sticky when you acknowledge the fact that Spotify ended up, y'know, potentially killing the album's relevance or radio's relevance for music discovery and moved that all to playlists.

Through that cannibalization process, they've given themselves the responsibility of being important tastemakers. So in that way, they've handed themselves this difficult problem.

Mat: Right. I'm not a vinyl aficionado, but I've gone to plenty of record stores and had conversations with store owners about how they decide to buy stock and who they choose to highlight. Sometimes it'll be about what sells, but mostly it's very curation-minded. Folks at Spotify who operate on that same mentality don't reach their neighborhood cohort of music fans. Rap Caviar reaches almost 10 million people, Today's Top Hits almost 20 million.

They've taken curation out of this personal scale and away from radio, where a listener at least knows who a radio DJ is or can recognize their voice, to something that is widely distributed and commonly impersonal. Radio wasn't perfect — remember payola scandals? — but Spotify is a different beast. They've changed the culture such that playlists are how tons of people find new music, but they're only just now grasping the social and political implications of that. Commercially, they're still happy about it.

Is Spotify only doing this now because the R. Kelly accusations are finally boiling over, or do you think this reckoning with responsible curation has been a long time coming?

Ben: I think it's both. I'm sure Spotify's curators have been discussing this for a long time, at least since Chris Brown. I was trying to think of a good analogy in terms of platforms — think Facebook, and how they've had to deal with the issues of suppressing certain content and certain publishers for various ideological reasons, both liberal and conservative. Think of Reddit, which blocks some Digg links because we're a fellow curator! Or even Google. Any platform that relies on an algorithm has to come up against that.

Step back and look at the way this was done, though. Spotify makes an announcement of their new policy, their… hate speech and hate action policy?

Mat: It's "hate content and hateful conduct," which I feel like was definitely spun up by someone with a fondness for wordplay. There's definitely an internal document where it's called the "HC&HC" policy.

Ben: So, they announce this new policy and then the same day a Billboard article comes out saying that the first two people are R. Kelly and XXXTentacion, who've both been in the news for high profile abuse allegations.

Mat: Right, and then Variety reports that, according to an inside source, Spotify has taken action to quietly remove artists accused of abuse from curated and algorithmic playlists in the past. The notion that this is something that requires a press release is interesting because it's one part Spotify trying to avoid a sensational story about a quiet blacklisting, and it's one part Spotify asserting their solidarity with #MuteRKelly… to a degree, because they still haven't removed his music from the platform.

They've said they'll remove hate content, so a self-identified Neo-Nazi band might get completely removed from Spotify, but it opens up a gray area that corporations running content platforms don't like having to deal with. It's a problem they've made for themselves.

Ben: I think it's good that they've been addressing this in a quieter way. In opening up their editors' decisions or whoever's decision to remove R. Kelly, they open up a can of worms. Are artists who've faced previous (and recent) allegations like Chris Brown going to be quote-unquote censored, will Eminem's songs with homophobic lyrics be removed from playlists?

Mat: This slippery slope response is what XXXTentacion's and R. Kelly's representation immediately jumped to. They leap to whataboutism, bringing up Brown and Gene Simmons and David Bowie. That's what Spotify has opened themselves up to now.

a response from XXXTentacion's team on Spotify's decision to remove him from playlists pic.twitter.com/ivtEDJ2yGS — Joe Coscarelli (@joecoscarelli) May 10, 2018

Spotify has been a career-maker (they helped XXXTentacion take off), and now they find themselves in a position of power where they can choose to have a serious negative effect on a musician's career. On the curatorial side I'm sure this was a much-debated decision. Taking this stance is a very calculated decision for a company like Spotify to make, period. Are they pissing off investors, are they pissing off music partners, are they alienating users? They've surely considered all that.

Ben: My sense is that it should be a careful decision. To me, though, announcing this policy change and then only mentioning the removal of two artists from their playlists looks like a hurried, rash move. I bet it has other artists with allegations against them scrambling to Spotify to try to keep themselves on playlists.

Mat: This is the difference! If I go to a record store and find out that they tossed all their R. Kelly albums in the trash, I can have the conversation about that with the store owner. I might say "okay, what about Chris Brown?" That's a person-to-person interaction, and that store isn't the only place someone could go for music. It's not the primary place people at-large go to for music.

For Spotify to make a hurried decision to blacklist two artists opens that door for whataboutism to run rampant for the foreseeable future, unless they actually come up with a solid policy. A solid policy would reaffirm Spotify as a platform but contradict their selling point as a curatorial outfit that can approach each instance differently and make a real statement about artistic merit in each case.

Ben: As it stands right now, the policy is "when an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful (for example, violence against children and sexual violence), it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator." It's the vaguest thing possible.

Another question this policy raises is "will an artist ever be allowed back?" Not to go there, but it really does raise larger questions about justice. When has an artist redeemed themselves? How long after someone's crimes will they be forgiven by Spotify?

Mat: It's fine to talk about the big picture here because Spotify is such a juggernaut in the industry now. Let's say Pitchfork decided they weren't going to review or cover any new R. Kelly releases and they were going to retroactively delist all the old reviews. That'd be one thing, and I think there would be a general understanding out there of Pitchfork as one amongst many editorial and curatorial resources. Spotify is more akin to a grocery store in a food desert. If the grocery store says "we're not going to stock flour anymore," that limits people.

Ben: It's like the opposite of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For artists who are making their living and attaining fame through clicks, listens and attention, is there a right to be remembered?

Mat: Since the music industry is so much more centralized thanks to services like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal, access for listeners and artists alike has changed. In the past, so long as an artist's music was physically out there, a person could do their best to find it and listen to it. Businesses like Spotify are doing their best to choke every other option for access out of existence. Sure, there are definitely artists who've done heinous things and who shouldn't receive the support of Spotify, but in a future where a platform like Spotify is the only option for access, that music might as well be gone for good.

Ben: Right, but that's a cultural concern. Spotify's original concern boils down to the money R. Kelly receives from each playlist play. In 20 years, Spotify still won't want to be giving R. Kelly money from playlists.

Mat: Yeah. For Spotify, with its mission for curation and the kind of streaming business incentives at play, there's no satisfying answer when it comes to removing an artist in full or from sponsored playlists. They're so large that taking action against an artist either raises questions beyond the scope of this one instance, or the action they take is so small they end up looking like an impersonal corporation that doesn't care.

Ben: The only way that I could see an easy out for Spotify here would be to remove themselves from the curation business. Remain a platform, and leave curation to outsiders. Obviously, that's not going to happen any time soon.

Mat: That'd be like saying for us at Digg, confronted with the hottest viral piece of content that's actually something morally objectionable, do we wipe our hands of our responsibility as editors and post it anyway or do we let the golden goose fly away?

Ben: I feel like sometimes we do make that decision. Sometimes there are things that are clicking everywhere that we decide not to wade into.

Mat: Sure. I think the ultimate question is, is Spotify too big to even make and stand by those decisions any more? Is there a choice they can make in a situation like this without being confronted by their own hypocrisy?