In the UK, an investigation by Sky News led to the discovery of racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist contents in podcasts were immediately followed by the actions of the streaming giant, Spotify, in removing about 150 hours of podcasts from its servers.
Sky News commenting on Spotify’s actions “The company said it does not allow hate content on its platform. But we found podcasts totaling several days’ worth of listening promoting extreme views such as scientific racism, Holocaust denial, and far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories,”. The Spotify takedown took place after receiving notification about their (Sky News UK) discovery to Spotify.
This happens days after controversy around yet another form of spoken-word content on Spotify: comedy recordings. Spotify has now taken down a number of those podcasts also, in a row over whether Spotify has licensed the underlying literary works as well as the recordings (in essence: comedy’s equivalent of the composition).
The streaming service is under pressure to license the literary works from two agencies in the US: Spoken Giants and Word Collections – the latter founded by a familiar figure in the history of Spotify licensing controversies: TuneCore and Audiam founder Jeff Price.
