Spotify CEO admits their Hateful Conduct policy was ‘rolled out wrong’

Over the last month, there has been a lot of focus put on Spotify and other streaming services for their decision to remove the music of a number of artists from their playlists in accordance with their new “Hateful Conduct” policy. However, the CEO of Spotify has now conceded that there were mistakes made with the policy’s implementation.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Spotify were to remove the music of artists who music supposedly “advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual.” Two artists that were specifically named by the streaming service included R. Kelly and XXXTentacion, and their music was soon removed from playlists on the platform.

While an advocacy group followed this news by urgeing Spotify to remove further artists, hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar soon hit back at the service, threatening to pull his music from Spotify because he felt that the new policy was unfairly targeting people of colour.

Now, as Variety reports, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had admitted fault, revealing during a keynote Q&A at the Code Conference on Thursday night that their new policy was “rolled out wrong”.

“We rolled this out wrong and could have done a much better job,” Ek admitted. “The whole goal with this was to make sure that we didn’t have hate speech. It was never about punishing one individual artist or even naming one individual artist.”

Daniel Ek also admitted that he “took personal responsibility for the botched rollout” and that he “deemed the policy too ambiguous and open to interpretation.”

While Spotify have begun to restore XXXTentacion’s music to their service, the policy is still listed on their website, though it’s not clear if it will be changed at any point in the future following the statements made by the company’s CEO.

Check out The Clash’s ‘Hateful’:

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.