you can now mute artists on Spotify

Spotify

Spotify has now made it so you can mute an artist, which will block them from being played on playlists and showing up in charts, radio, or your personal library. Billboard reports:

The music streaming service has quietly gone wide with a feature that makes it a breeze to block a particular artist from automatically playing in personal and curated playlists as well as charts, radio or a user’s personal library.

To engage the feature, you simply have to click the “Don’t play this artist” button located in the menu area for every artist. If you change your mind, you just go back to the same place and hit “Remove.”

What the “Don’t play” button doesn’t do is wipe the artist off the face of your Spotify account. Rather, the song or artist will continue to appear in searches, playlists, charts and radio — it just won’t get played unless you manually click on it. For example, muting James Blake and Robyn doesn’t erase it from a playlist like Ultimate Indie, it just breezily skips over those songs.

It appears that the “Don’t play this artist” button is currently only available on mobile, but that once you mute an artist, they’ll be muted on any device you use your Spotify account. Thurrott also points out that the feature doesn’t block artists on tracks they’re featured on.

This new feature follows last year’s Hate Content and Hateful Conduct policy, which was launched in part as a way to stop promoting R. Kelly‘s music, but was quickly rolled back. The introduction of this feature comes as the #MuteRKelly campaign is more popular than ever, thanks to Lifetime’s new Surviving R. Kelly series.