Spotify reversed their poorly thought out "Hateful Conduct" policy after receiving much backlash. After revealing their new policy, many people were threatening to boycott Spotify including Top Dawg Entertainment. TDE's CEO Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith revealed that he was willing to pull Kendrick Lamar's music off of the platform and get the whole culture to back out too if they didn't change something quickly.
Following Spotify's roll out for their "hateful conduct" policy, there were reports that Kendrick Lamar and TDE threatened to pull their music off of the streaming platform. Top Dawg explained to Billboard that he reached out to Spotify's global head of creator services, Troy Carter, and expressed that the company can't censor artists.
"I don't think it's right for artists to be censored, especially in our culture. How did they just pick those [artists] out? How come they didn't pick out any others from any other genres or any other different cultures?" He said, "But it seems to me that they're constantly picking on hip-hop culture."
Following his conversation with Carter, he also spoke to Diddy, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and more about the situation.
"My whole thing with them was, we gotta fix this situation, and if it can't be fixed, then there's gonna be a real problem, we're gonna have to start pulling our music from the site," he remembered. "I was willing to get the whole culture to back out. There were other people in the business, other powerful artists that were willing to back what I was saying, because nobody agrees with censorship like that."
Despite this, Top Dawg explained that Spotfy's intentions weren't malicious but the way they went about it is wrong. He said Ek heard him loud and clear and they understood each other's intentions. However Top Dawg was focused on a bigger picture with trying to reverse the policy.
"This is for the future. If they censor us now, ain't no telling what's going to happen in the future. It's a slippery slope if you start censoring music. You gotta let artists be artists and speak freely. That was the main thing."
