Jonathan Prince, who joined Spotify as Global Head of Communications and Public Policy in September 2014, has left the company, MBW has confirmed.
Prince, a former aide to both Bill and Hilary Clinton who was close to the Obama White House, has been a key architect of Spotify’s public-facing strategy.
The New York-based exec has now joined work-flow platform Slack as Head of Strategic Communications and Senior Advisor to the CEO.
Insiders tell MBW that, at various points during his Spotify tenure, Prince reported direct to Daniel Ek.
Prince is thought to be the originator of Spotify’s controversial ‘hateful content’ policy which was announced in May last year and saw the temporary removal of R.Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music from the service’s playlists.
“We don’t censor content because of an artist’s or creator’s behavior, but we want our editorial decisions – what we choose to program – to reflect our values,” Spotify said at the time. “When an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful, it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator.”
Following outcry amongst its users, Spotify backtracked on the policy, reversing its decision to ban artists from playlists based on misconduct outside of their music.
Prince has also been a vocal critic of Apple‘s so-called ‘app tax’, which sees the Cupertino company take a 30% commission from every subscription sold via an app on its iOS App Store.
“You know there’s something wrong when Apple makes more off a Spotify subscription than it does off an Apple Music subscription and doesn’t share any of that with the music industry,” Prince said in 2016.
“They want to have their cake and eat everyone else’s too.”Music Business Worldwide
