Spotify Technology SA, the world's most popular music streaming platform, has decided to suspend political ads from the start of 2020, the company announced on Friday, and the news is reported by Reuters on Sunday, December 29. Spotify now has 141 million users who tune into its platform based precisely on listening to free music supported by advertising. The stop will also affect original and exclusive podcasts produced by the same platform.
The move is to be seen in connection with the start of the campaign for the US presidential elections and with the overheating of politics in view of the vote set for November 2020.
Spotify isn't the only Over the Top to grapple with the problem of political advertising. Facebook and Google are also facing increasing pressure on the risk of political disinformation on their platforms and on the request to block political ads that can fuel it with false or distorting slogans, as happened instead in the previous presidential elections which decreed the defeat of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton . Twitter already banned political ads last October while Google for now has said it wants to ban ads that use data on electoral records (referring to gender, blank ballots, abstention, etc:) and political affiliations.
The Spotify spokesperson told Reuters that, at the moment, it is not possible to do more as the company does not have the tools to check and validate the contents of the messages but also added that the decisions will be updated as the operational tools will improve. However, he did not want to make statements on how much political advertising weighs on Spotify's revenues, which will now be suspended.
