Following in the footsteps of Spotify—and iTunes, which made a move to clear its catalog of “hate rock” bands three years ago, after an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center drew attention to their growing presence in the streaming music world—a number of streaming services and online music distributors, including French streamer Deezer, CD Baby, and all of Google’s various offerings—have pledged to find and remove Nazi-themed music from their libraries. This is per Variety, which notes that the increased spotlight on white supremacist movements in America of late has summoned up an increased call for companies to keep their rosters clear of bands whose music endorses racially motivated violence.
Deezer has confirmed that it’s outright removing such artists from its lists, while Google has reiterated that its policies say it’ll remove any hate speech or music that’s flagged by its users. (Variety points out that that’s presumably why songs with lyrics like “Stand up and fight / be proud to be white / Hitler was right” still show up on the company’s services, at least for now.) Meanwhile, CD Baby—an indie music distributor with millions of songs uploaded to it, and which is at least partially responsible for passing some of these bands along to Spotify and its ilk—issued a statement saying that “We believe hate speech is particularly odious, and we try not to carry it, per our hate speech policy,” but noted that the sheer volume of traffic it receives makes it borderline impossible to filter out everything. Still, the company has restated its commitment to removing and banning those artists when they’re found.