When R. Kelly’s music streams slumped after the #MuteRKelly campaign, it looked like listeners had turned their backs on him. A new analysis finds that most of the drop came from Spotify quietly removing his songs from its playlists, while the boycott calls themselves pushed listening up.
The working paper is by Daniel Winkler and Nils Wlömert of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Jura Liaukonyte of Cornell University’s S.C. Johnson College of Business. It was released in August 2024 and is available on SSRN.
A natural experiment on Spotify
In 2018, after a surge of #MuteRKelly posts in late April and early May, Spotify removed R. Kelly from its editorial and algorithmic playlists under a new hateful conduct policy. His music stayed available to anyone who searched for it.
That created a natural experiment. Ten R. Kelly songs that had been on Spotify-curated playlists lost that exposure, while his other songs had never had it. The researchers compared both groups with similar control songs, using weekly streaming data from Luminate, the company that supplies figures for the Billboard charts, across all major platforms in the United States and Germany. They also tracked daily listings on almost 900,000 Spotify playlists and analysed more than 11 million tweets about the singer.
Streams of the delisted songs fell by about 25% in the US, while his other songs fell by only 3.8%. The authors treat that 3.8% as a realistic upper bound for any deliberate boycott. In Germany the figures were similar, 27.63% and 4.95%.
The drop was steepest where listening is most passive. On ad-supported tiers in Germany, streams of delisted songs fell 40.38%, against 25.92% on premium tiers. “Ignition (Remix),” which had been on playlists with more than 5 million followers, fell 38% relative to its synthetic control.
The documentary gave his music a boost
The second test came in January 2019, when Lifetime aired the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” and boycott calls surged again. Online sentiment turned sharply negative, with the share of negative emotions in tweets rising by 20 percentage points.
Streams nonetheless rose significantly in the four weeks after the release, with the largest jump, 117.74%, in the week immediately afterwards. Using regional data, the authors found the spike came mainly from areas where he already had a large fan base, pointing to existing fans returning to his music rather than curious newcomers.
Wallen and Rammstein kept their audiences
The researchers also looked at two scandals without platform sanctions. Country star Morgan Wallen faced a backlash after being filmed shouting a racial slur, and the German band Rammstein faced #MeToo allegations. Neither saw a long-term decline in demand, and Rammstein’s streams in Germany rose after the allegations emerged. The authors caution that these long-run comparisons are harder to read as causal.
For R. Kelly, the platform’s decision was costly. His US streams ended up 47% below market trends, and the authors estimate about 1.4 billion forgone streams over 241 weeks, or roughly $3.3 million to $4.9 million in lost US income at standard payout rates.
Study Details:
- Title: Separating the Artist from the Art: Social Media Boycotts, Platform Sanctions, and Music Consumption
- Authors: Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, Jura Liaukonyte
- Journal: Cornell University Working Paper (SSRN)
- Publication Date: August 2024
- DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4929261