The R Kelly conundrum: does Spotify’s new mute button go far enough?

Spotify’s recent introduction of a mute button might come across as just another innocuous tech feature rollout. But while it was added without fanfare, the timing – as many commentators have pointed out – is striking.

The “don’t play this artist” button, which drives the application to skip songs by an artist of your choice wherever they appear, has been introduced in the wake of dream hampton’s explosive documentary, which delves into allegations that Kelly has been abusing women of colour – some whom were underage – for decades.

While Kelly continues to deny allegations, and he has never been criminally charged, the attention drawn to them this decade – by way of a 2013 interview with Jim DeRogatis, who had been covering the story doggedly since the early 2000s; a 2017 Buzzfeed investigation; various activist movements led by women of colour; and finally the documentary – has led to widespread outrage against not just Kelly, but the companies that continue to profit from his music.

The #MuteRKelly campaign began trending on Twitter in 2017, leading to a series of cancelled concerts, and now a petition calling for Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube to drop his music has gathered more than 160,000 signatures.

It’s into this arena that the mute button arrives.

The timing may or may not be a coincidence; any company managing a piece of software as complex and widely used as Spotify will at any moment be juggling a slew of feature requests and bug reports. But while Spotify has not commented on its motivation, it wouldn’t be the first time that it has altered its offering in response to complaints about Kelly. In May last year, after Time’s Up’s women of colour subcommittee lent their support to the #MuteRKelly campaign, the company removed his songs from its playlist algorithms – part of the abortive implementation of a policy on “hate content and hateful conduct”.

“We don’t censor content because of an artist’s or creator’s behavior, but we want our editorial decisions ... to reflect our values,” Spotify said at the time. “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.” The decision was reversed a month later.

As Vulture’s Dee Lockett explains, Spotify’s implementation of the mute button this month seems to have again been driven by activist groups – this time Color of Change, a US nonprofit that describes itself as a racial justice organisation, which has been pushing for Kelly’s complete removal from the streaming platform.

The mute button: a way to shift the onus?

While the mute button is being called “the R Kelly button” on Twitter, it’s not Spotify who will be pressing it: Kelly’s music remains on the streaming platform, where it is listened to by more than 5.3 million people every month – and there’s no suggestion that it will ever be removed.

Instead, Spotify is employing a tactic tech companies and platforms have proved adept at: shifting responsibility on to users. As the term “platform” itself suggests, the business model is to provide a virtual space for users to generate content, and then to skim a little bit off the value of that content. It’s genius insofar as it provides a way for a company to make a lot of money while doing very little apart from developing software – which is, after all, what tech companies are supposed to be good at.

What these companies are not good at, though, is dealing with the problems that arise in virtual spaces where users can basically do as they like. The reluctance of Facebook and Twitter to police their platforms has been well-documented, and has resulted in both sites becoming increasingly unpleasant spaces to spend time in. As they have grown, both companies have made concessions to the fact that they can’t simply abrogate responsibility for what’s on their platforms given how ripe for exploitation it makes them – but, in both cases, the horse has long since bolted.

Spotify doesn’t have the same need for moderation as its peers – it removed direct messaging two years ago – but its refusal to block Kelly (and other high-streaming artists with allegedly violent pasts, such as XXXTentacion) demonstrates another cross-platform constant: these companies are never keen to kill their golden egg-laying geese. Donald Trump, for instance, violates Twitter’s terms of service pretty much every day, but Twitter has consistently refused to censure him. (When journalist Ashley Feinberg recently asked Twitters chief executive, Jack Dorsey, if there was anything Trump would do that could qualify as misuse – what would happen, for example, if the president “tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist”? – Dorsey’s response was not exactly definitive: “That would be a violent threat. We’d definitely ... we’d certainly talk about it.”)

‘Our role is not to regulate artists’

The question of whether Kelly’s music should be removed from Spotify ties into a debate as old as art itself: can you separate the art from the artist? It certainly isn’t easy when it comes to Kelly, whose songs and entire brand revolves around sex. At times, his lyrics seem to allude directly to his alleged behaviour: this is a man who has been accused of decades’ worth of sexual assaults against minors, and who sings a song whose lyrics include “Keep it on the downlow / Nobody has to know”. Separating his hypersexual art from the allegations levelled against him is almost impossible.

And even if you believe Kelly’s alleged actions justify his banishment from public life, what about artists whose cases are less open-and-shut? As Pitchfork’s Jillian Mapes asked last year, do we really want companies like Spotify to act as the arbiters of taste and decency? What exactly are the criteria for being deemed not fit for the platform? How are actual convictions weighted against repeated allegations, and is there a statute of limitations? “Worth considering as well,” she writes, “are the racial biases that make artists of color far more vulnerable to arrests and convictions.” And on it goes.

When Spotify backflipped on its conduct policy, it released a statement: “We don’t aim to play judge and jury ... our role is not to regulate artists.”

But, clearly, that’s not always the case. In August last year, Spotify removed several Alex Jones podcasts for violation of hate speech guidelines. Its policy appears to be that it will police content but not conduct. The case of R Kelly shows the limits of this approach and while Spotify’s response – telling users “You deal with it” – is certainly the easiest way out of a complex situation, for many it’s not enough.