You May Finally Be Able To Mute Artists You Don’t Want To Hear On Spotify

You May Finally Be Able To Mute Artists You Don’t Want To Hear On Spotify

Don’t want to hear an artist in Spotify playlists or radio? You may soon be able to block them.

Spotify appears to be testing an iOS feature that allows its users to mute artists from being played, tech blog Thurrott first reported Monday, giving even more control to listeners about what kinds of music they’re served on the platform. The feature isn’t available on desktop, and it may not be available to all users on iOS just yet either, per Thurrott:

The new feature does not seem to be available on other platforms, including Spotify on the desktop and web. If you are on iOS, however, you will likely receive the feature sometime soon, as the company seems to have been testing it for a few months with a smaller group of users and the firm only started rolling out to a wider group sometime last week.

To access it on iOS, navigate to an artist’s page and click the “More” button up top in the righthand corner. You should see “Don’t play this artist” appear as the second option in a list of commands; click it, and voilà! No more of whatever your ears find particularly offensive. Here’s what it’ll look like:

The artists will still populate in playlists, but from what I could tell by testing this feature myself, the artist won’t play at all even if you manually click a song by that musician. But as Thurrott pointed out, the function won’t mute artist features, meaning there’s still a chance you could hear them on someone else’s track.

This is an option that Spotify listeners have been asking for a while. Most recently, campaigns like #MuteRKelly have called for Spotify and other streaming services to pull the artist’s music from their platforms in response to Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly docuseries that revealed years of alleged abuse by the artist.

Last year, as the musician faced mounting allegations of sexual abuse, Spotify announced that it would no longer “actively promote” his music through “algorithmic recommendations such as Discover Weekly.” (His music is still available on the platform.)

Oddly, as Thurrott also noted, Spotify’s support team just yesterday told a Twitter user asking about such a feature that blocking “isn’t possible right now”, even though it definitely appears to be. In the company’s response to the individual on Twitter, its support account linked to a 2017 blog post in which the company said it “decided not to offer blocking/hiding/or blacklisting artists or tracks on Spotify at this time.”

Spotify did not return multiple requests for comment about the feature, but we’ll update if we hear back.

[Thurrott via the Verge]


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