While recent music industry headlines have been dominated by issues raised by streaming services and online music retailers, one issue seemingly remains untouched and that is the unfortunate and rather disturbing cataloging of white power music by nearly every major online retailer.
As Noisey reports, a recent investigation by Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed a staggering amount of white power music, National Socialist black metal (NSBM), and otherwise offensive and potentially dangerous material freely available for purchase online from major retailers like iTunes.
“The racist music industry, a once lucrative source of funding for the white power movement, is a shadow of its former self… 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,” Hankes writes.
Punk News documented this back in 2006, tracing the source of a release by white power icons Skrewdriver one of their readers had discovered on iTunes back to indie music retailer CD Baby. However, CD Baby President Derek Sivers was reticent to condemn the cataloging of such objectionable sonic artefacts.
“It’s too slippery of a slope to go anywhere near it. Start with one album, and we’ll have to commit ourselves to a lifetime of deciding, on every album that comes in, if it’s offensive or hateful and if we should allow it. We get 200-300 new albums a day now, so there’s just no way we can judge them all,” Sivers told Punk News.
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“Plus, I don’t want to let complainers rule our actions. What if we started getting complaints about Pagan albums? Complaints about Liberal politics albums? Do we remove anything that lots of people complain about? Obviously not.”
“So what we decided to do is this: For every dollar we make selling some obviously racist/Nazi/whatever album, we contribute two dollars to anti-racist organizations like UNCF and and others; the guys in the warehouse pick the organizations as they see fit.”
However, while Sivers’ sentiments are understandable, the issue of informing consumers of what they’re buying remains. For example, if an iTunes user looking for hardcore punk music stumbles onto an artist page belonging to a white nationalist group, does that user not deserve to be made aware of what they may be spending their money on?
This issue is further complicated by the fact that while some degree of curation can be expected in an independent record store where teams of employees invested in their own catalog ensure quality control, it is more difficult for corporations that command humongous catalogs like iTunes to employ a hands-on approach.
However, it’s important to note that Apple, the creators of iTunes, do in fact employ a large degree of curation in their App Store, famously engaging in a clean of house several years ago, which saw numerous adult, sexually oriented, and offensive apps removed from the store.
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The result of this is that openly racist recordings from groups like The Bully Boys, Adalruna, Kristallnacht, and more are available for purchase on the Australian iTunes store and on Spotify, often with no information about the bands to whom the money would be going.
And it’s not simply a matter of avoiding that side of iTunes altogether. As Hankes reports, “Built-in features such as iTunes’ ‘Listeners Also Bought’ section help promote similar artists to those a shopper already listens to.”
“For instance, a query for Skrewdriver in iTunes leads to suggestions that a shopper also purchase albums by Brutal Attack, Final War, Bully Boys and other hate bands. What’s more, a shopper may be recommended a hate band after browsing the catalog of a non-racist hardcore or metal band.”
Indeed, as Hankes writes, this is a new a type of exposure that has never before been “so openly available for an insular music scene that has depended on word of mouth to gain popularity”.
A subsequent investigation by Noisey discovered that the American catalogs of many online music destinations, including Spotify, Google Play, Beats Music, Rdio, Amazon, and Pandora, all featured music by white power bands.
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According to Noisey, tracing the recordings back to their source is an uphill battle, with many labels and distributors of white power punk rock shutting down in recent years and the sheer number of distributors and labels stocking white power metal making it nigh impossible to trace back an individual release.
Considering the US’ free speech laws, it is unlikely that iTunes, Spotify, or other platforms can be forced to remove the material from their Stateside stores on legal grounds. What this means then is that the onus is in fact on iTunes, a private company operating in a free market, to remove the content of their own volition.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the issue is a little more complex. In 2002, the Federal Court applied the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 in the case of Jones v. Toben. The case involved a complaint about a website which contained material that denied the Holocaust, with the Federal Court ruling that the material was a violation of the Act.
However, while Section 85ZE of the Crimes Act 1914 makes it an offence to use the Internet to disseminate material intentionally that results in a person being menaced or harassed, it does not apply to material that is merely offensive but wherein the element of threat or harassment is also present.
While it’s unclear what legal ramifications could come of iTunes and other platforms cataloging music that proudly espouses hate speech, if any, a responsibility remains with consumers to ensure they know where their money is going the next time they buy.
