Yes, it’s finally happening. Spotify seems to be testing a new feature for its app that will allow users to block any artist on the platform. The block button is a much-requested feature from Spotify users, which would allow you to block music from an artist on automatically curated playlists like Discover Weekly, your Daily Mixes, as well as things like global charts.
With an upcoming update, Spotify will let you block music from any artist you don’t like throughout the app. This means it will block music from that artist on your personal library, playlists, automatically curated playlists, charts, radios, and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from an artist you’ve blocked even if you wanted to — and you’d have to unblock an artist before you can play a certain track from them. Blocking an artist doesn’t block tracks they have featured on, however. The feature is going to be amazingly useful if you don’t like music from popular artists and always have to skip through their tracks on public playlists, algorithm-generated playlists and global charts. And you can block people like R. Kelly, too.
The new feature can be accessed from the “…” menu on an artist’s page, where you can click “Don’t play this artist” to stop playing music from an artist.
Spotify continues to say that blocking an artist “isn’t possible right now” as of yesterday. The company said back in 2017 that it has decided against offering a block button for artists after “serious” consideration. And it seems like that’s not the case anymore.
The new block button for artists still seems limited to a small number of users. I happen to be part of Spotify’s beta program on iOS, and thus I have access to the new feature, as well as a slightly tweaked design for artists pages. The new feature does not seem to be available on other platforms, including Spotify on the desktop and web. If you are on iOS, however, you will likely receive the feature sometime soon, as the company seems to have been testing it for a few months with a smaller group of users and the firm only started rolling out to a wider group sometime last week.
Tagged with Spotify
