In December 2022, Twitter suspended the account of Kanye West, now known as Ye, due to violations of the platform’s regulations concerning incitement of violence. This suspension was a consequence of West’s series of antisemitic remarks, including a statement threatening “Go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” tweeted by West on October 8. Notably, Instagram had taken action a day prior by placing restrictions on Ye’s account for suggesting that the rapper Diddy (Sean Combs) was being controlled by Jews. These assertions resulted in a rapid disintegration of several business deals, including collaborations with Adidas, Gap, and the luxury fashion brand Balenciaga.
However, Kanye West’s music stays on Spotify. Despite a swift backlash and several business partners cutting ties with Kanye West, music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal continue to include Kanye West’s music within their playlists.
According to industry analysts and legal experts, the decision to remove Kanye West’s music could be a complex interplay due to several factors. Multiple elements contribute to this complexity, including contract obligations that streaming platforms may have with record labels and publishers, the consideration of free speech, and whether it is appropriate to address an artist’s conduct beyond their music realm. An additional layer of complication arises from the involvement of other collaborators, such as songwriters and producers, who contribute to West’s songs; removing his music would inevitably impact them as well.
Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, shared with Reuters that while he found West’s antisemitic remarks “just awful,” they do not manifest within the music available for streaming on Spotify, “It’s really just his music, and his music doesn’t violate our policy.” This Swedish streaming giant has been delicately maintaining a balance between mitigating offensive content and safeguarding artists’ and podcasters’ freedom of speech. Ek told Reuters: “It’s up to his label if they want to take action or not.”
While Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, which also host West’s music, remained unresponsive or declined to offer a statement.
“Is there an actual legal reason to do a takedown on his music? I don’t think so,” said Helen Yu, principal attorney at Yu Leseberg. “The hate speech is not in his music. So why would you take his music down? You don’t like this person? Don’t listen to his music. Don’t support him. Don’t let him make money.”
According to the data from Luminate, albums by Kanye West are down 23% through Oct 20, 2022, and radio airplay has dropped off 13% in the U.S. On some stations, like Los Angeles’ KIIS-FM, the rapper’s rotation in the last week went down to zero. Ye’s streaming numbers have slipped a bit, declining by about 6% to 88 million on-demand clicks in the United States.
However, Ye’s stockpile of hits continues to enjoy popularity, making him finish the year 2022 as Spotify’s top four most-streamed artists in the U.S. As of August 2023, with 56.4 million monthly listeners and 20.8 million followers, Kanye West holds the rank of the 27th most popular artist on Spotify globally.
As of late July 2023, Kanye West’s Twitter account was reinstated after an approximately eight-month suspension due to his previous offensive tweets. However, West’s account will not be eligible for monetization, and no ads will appear next to his posts. Up until now, the musician has not made any posts on the platform since its restoration. In a similar vein, Kanye West deactivated his Instagram account after sharing a screenshot of the Instagram account deactivation screen in April 2023.
Spotify does provide a download feature, but please keep in mind that:
If you want to download Spotify songs without Premium, you can try an intelligent Spotify music downloader — Pazu Spotify Converter. It is specially designed for both Spotify Free and Premium users to download all Spotify songs, albums, playlists, and podcasts for offline listening. It can extract Spotify music and convert them to MP3, M4A, AIFF, WAV, FLAC, and AAC. With Pazu Spotify Music Converter, you can easily enjoy any Spotify Premium feature within a free account forever.
Key features of Pazu Spotify Converter:
Now, let’s learn how to use Pazu Spotify Music Converter to download and convert Spotify songs with a free subscription from the following tutorial.
Download, install, and run Pazu Spotify Converter on your Mac or Windows. Log in to your Spotify account with the built-in web player.
Click the gear icon on the top right corner. Here you can select the output format (AUTO(M4A)/MP3/AAC/FLAC/WAV/AIFF), choose output audio quality, customize the output path, organize the output files in various ways, rename output files, and more.
Use the integrated Spotify web player to search the songs, albums, playlists,s or podcasts you want to download. Click the Add to List button to load all songs in the album or playlist, and uncheck the songs you don’t want to download if there are any.
Click the Convert button to start downloading the Spotify songs to your local computer.
Once the conversion is done, you can find your Spotify songs downloaded as local files by clicking the below folder button or directly going to the output folder you customized in the previous step.
Note: The free trial version of Pazu Spotify Converter enables you to convert the first three minutes of each song. You can remove the trial limitation by purchasing the full version.
Download and convert any Spotify songs, albums, playlists to MP3/M4A etc.