Apple recently took down work on iTunes from bands that was deemed white-power or racial-supremacy music by the Southern Poverty Law Center in a new report. The company came under fire for offering the hateful music as well as giving customers more options with the "Listeners Also Bought" feature. According to Rolling Stone and Noisey, Apple deleted 30 of the 54 bands last week that the SPLC pointed out in the report, but other online vendors like Amazon and Google have yet to do so.
"The racist music industry, a once lucrative source of funding for the white power movement, is a shadow of its former self," the report reads. "Over the past decade, it has become increasingly fragmented and disorganized in the wake of the collapse of several major labels and distributors. Concerts have become scarce and those that remain have been driven even further underground. However, the ever-resilient white power music scene has found new hope and new profit amidst the wreckage of a once multimillion-dollar industry from an unlikely source: the world's largest music vendor, iTunes."
Apple's Terms and Conditions page for iTunes restricts submissions of work that is "obscene, objectionable or in poor taste," but that apparently was not strictly enforced.
Spotify is another company that offers racial supremacy music. It uses Germany's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons — aka BPjM — for standards. Spotify has not taken down artists recomended by the SPLC.
"We take this very seriously," a rep for Spotify told RS. "Content — artists and music — listed by the BPjM in Germany is proactively removed from our service. We're a global company, so we use the BPjM index as a global standard for these issues. Other potentially hateful or objectionable content that is flagged by uses or others but not on the BPjM list is handled on a case by case basis."
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