Music is a truly polarizing force. We love some artists and we hate others. Two true emotional extremes brought on by different arrangements of rhythms and beats. When it comes to loving music, nobody helps more of us find the music we love than Spotify, which has more monthly subscribers than any other music streaming service. For hating music, however, Spotify has always taken the position that it can’t be that bad.
Back in 2017, Spotify publicly stated “after serious consideration” that it wasn’t going to start allowing us to block the artists we don’t want to hear. If we’re is listening to Discover or a public playlist and a song from that artist we just can’t stand is coming up, we just have to hit skip once it comes on. Spotify decided against offering a way of automatically filtering out those artists we hate. This has now changed.
Users have been reporting on social media that they’ve spotted a new block artist feature on their Spotify apps. According to a report by Thurrott, this roll-out has only reached members of the Spotify beta program on iOS, which means the streaming giant is still testing the feature. The same report goes on to say that, although Spotify’s official position is still that you can’t block artists, it has been testing this exact feature for months with a select group of users. The reason more people are reporting the feature now is that the test has recently been extended to a larger group.
How to block artists on Spotify
To block an artist on Spotify you need to click the … icon on their profile page. This will take you to the settings menu for the artist. From here you’ll see the new option Don’t play this artist. Tapping this option will stop Spotify from playing music by that artist in the future. The feature will even prevent you from manually selecting music by blocked artists.
If you want to play music by an artist you’ve previously blocked, you’ll first have to unblock them. The only way you’ll be able to hear music by a blocked artist is if they feature on a track by another artist. Spotify’s new block artist feature won’t block tracks the artist has featured on if they’re not the primary artist.
This is the feature all you haters out there have been waiting for. I’ve been waiting for it, too. For me, it is inane pop music and generic EDM that’ll be going straight into my Don’t playlist. On top of the music I can’t stand I’ll also likely use the new feature to block artists like R. Kelly and Chris Brown. There is still no official word about when the feature will roll-out to all of us, but it looks like iOS users, at least, will get it soon. When the block artist feature comes to your phone, PC, or Mac who will you be blocking first?
