How to Block Groups on Spotify
Go ahead and get rid of the “Thanks, next” joke from your system. I’ll wait. Because that’s exactly what you’ll do with Spotify’s latest feature: letting the various bands you hate that you no longer want them to appear in the carefully curated playlists you like.
And it’s not just the annoying music. There are legitimate reasons why you might have moral objections to certain artists – such as famous serial rapists – and would rather they just go away for good. If you’re lucky, you might even be able to kick them out of your Spotify life right now.
As Thurrott said yesterday , Spotify appears to be testing a new artist blocking feature “with a smaller user base .” I am not using the alpha or beta versions of the Spotify app, but I noticed that I have this feature. You should also check, as turning it on for any artist you don’t like will ensure you don’t have to hear it on Spotify again. As Mehedi Hasan describes:
“This means that this artist’s music will be locked in your personal library, playlists, auto-generated playlists, charts, radios and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from a blocked artist even if you wanted to – and you’ll have to unblock an artist before you can play a specific track from him. However, blocking an artist does not block the tracks on which it is posted. “
You might think it would be easy to block an artist as soon as one of their songs appears, but the process is a little more complicated than that. When you click the three dots icon next to a song title in the Spotify app, the context menu prevents you from directly blocking the artist.
Instead, you’ll have to scroll down a bit and click View Artist, or just visit the Spotify artist page right in the app. (While I can access artist blocking features in my Spotify iOS app, I didn’t see them in the web player or Android app when I wrote this article.)
Once there, you will need to click the same three-dotted icon in the upper right corner of the app to access the context menu for that artist. If you have access to Spotify’s blocking feature, you will see a new “Don’t play this artist” option. Click on that and you’ll be (almost entirely) free of them on Spotify – or at least until you change your mind (or get obsessed with a new single). If this happens, you will have to visit the artist page again to remove the block.
And it’s important to note that this “block” is not like the Facebook block, where you will never see what you block on the service. For example, when I blocked Abba on Spotify, they were still showing up in (incredible) Jonathan Van Ness playlists . However, when I was browsing the playlist, Spotify would skip all Abba songs automatically. (Sorry Jonathan!)
There is no information on when Spotify might roll out this feature to more users, so keep checking the app if you don’t have a blocking option. You can also try signing up for an alpha or beta test of the service if you need faster access to everything the company is working on.