Spotify made a mistake by playing “moral police” when it yanked the music of alleged sex fiend R. Kelly and accused abuser XXXTentacion from its popular playlists, its CEO said Thursday.
The mea culpa comes after the music-streaming service hit the pause button on its controversial new content policy last week — and returned XXXTentacion to its playlists.
R. Kelly remains off Spotify playlists. The star denies the allegations against him.
Chief Executive Daniel Ek, speaking at Recode’s Code conference late Wednesday, promised to fine-tune the rules moving forward.
Spotify’s now-aborted content policy came amid a number of accusations that Kelly ran a violent “sex cult” — while the 20-year-old XXXTentacion has been arrested and charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman and witness tampering.
Spotify’s move to yank the artists from its curated playlists caused an outcry from a number of music’s biggest names — including the rapper Kendrick Lamar — as well as Spotify employees.
“We rolled this out wrong and could have done a much better job,” Ek said.
“The whole goal with this was to make sure that we didn’t have hate speech on the service,” he continued. “It was never about punishing one individual.
“You get into really tricky things such as, ‘Has this person actually been charged with something, convicted with something?’ ” Ek said. “We want to express a lot of diverse opinions. We don’t want to be the judge and moral police of that.”
It was Ek’s first public appearance since Spotify’s April initial public offering. The service is fending off a growing threat from Apple Music for dominance in the streaming music space.
Shares of Spotify rose $1.33 on Thursday, to $157.71.