Music subscription services give you varying degrees of control over what music may hear. Some let you like songs, some let you vote songs up or down, and where you can do that—across playlists, stations, or on-demand tracks—varies greatly.
But one long-missing feature has been the ability to mute or block something you absolutely hate [like those dialog tracks interspersed between every song on the otherwise spectacular A Star Is Born album]. Tidal and Spotify are now taking steps to solve this problem.
Launched largely in response to public outrage against specific artists (e.g., R. Kelly), Spotify is rolling out a feature that lets you mute any artists. Just select don’t play this artist on any artist’s page, and Spotify will automatically skip tracks by this artists. Everywhere. This includes tracks on stations, in playlists, and even in your personal library. Stay tuned if you don’t see this feature yet—Spotify can be slow to deploy new features across all users and platforms.
Similarly, Tidal has also announced that they’ll be doing one better: Tidal will let you mute artists or individual tracks. Select block from the Playing screen, and you have the option of blocking the artist or the specific track that’s playing.
They may have acted out of social consciousness, or they could simply be jumping on an opportunity to differentiate. Whatever the reason, these services’ new features are a welcome addition that create a better experience for subscribers. We hope to see more music services offering similar capabilities soon.