You don’t want one song of an artist to be able to go back in a playlist that you listen to or your musical flow? It will now be possible. The streaming platform, Spotify will introduce a feature to block a singer, in the manner of a corresponding reaction. The work on this possibility, claimed for a long time by many users, has started after the controversy surrounding the british R&B singer R. Kelly, accused of multiple sexual assaults. The platform had already been withdrawn in may 2018, the singer of his “playlists”.
For the moment, the feature “lock” is in a testing phase in the last version of the application on iOS. Some american media, including The Penis, have had the opportunity to try it. If, for reasons of personal or artistic, you don’t want to hear this or that artist, it will be possible to indicate to the platform and the application automatically stops all his songs back in a stream, a playlist, a top or one of the radio channels offered by Spotify. The only limit identified for the moment by the bêtatesteurs: the blocking only applies to songs performed by the artist alone, and not those to which he has been able to collaborate (in a duo or in the form of ‘featuring’). Spotify has not yet communicated the date to which the feature will be available to all.
In 2017, Spotify had already considered the issue following many requests from its users. Several contributions had fostered a discussion on the blog of the platform, but Spotify had come to oppose an end of inadmissibility.
The magnitude and the consequences of the controversy on the case of R. Kelly seems to have changed his mind. Under the impetus of the movement #MeToo and Time’s Up, the boycott calls have multiplied, via the word-order #MuteRKelly (“Do shut up R. Kelly” on Twitter. In early January, a documentary aired on a cable channel presented the testimony of several women accusing him of having sexual relations with girls under the age of 16 years, and to be surrounded by women whom he was doing his sex slaves. On January 8, an attorney of Chicago has launched an appeal for witnesses in the framework of an investigation into these allegations. Another investigation has been launched in Atlanta, Georgia and New York. Moreover, her record label RCA, a subsidiary of Sony, has decided to break its contract with him.
