What Went Wrong With Spotify’s ‘Hateful Conduct’ Policy?

The #MeToo movement is often talked about as a cultural shift, but it is also—or at least seeks to be—a shift in business practices. That’s not only because workplaces, in a post-#MeToo world, should be safer for women. Corporations also have to weigh ethics, PR, and the bottom line as they decide whether to ditch  expensive talent and stop profiting off content made by abusers. For the #MeToo ideal of creeps not prospering to become a reality will, queasily, require corporate America to act as a major moral—and by proxy, yes, cultural—arbiter.

The thorniness of this entanglement between money and mores explains the recent flailing by Spotify around small anti-abuse reforms. In May, the streaming service announced a “hate content and hateful conduct policy” that of famous musicians facing #MeToo-related consequences. Yet the recording business fought back for the status quo, and Spotify“moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct.”