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Toby Keith In Memoriam?

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Toby Keith In Memoriam?

Toby Keith was the highest-grossing country star from 2000-09. During this period, he had 7 Country Number 1 albums (3 of which were also just straight-up Billboard No. 1s and many of which were multi-platinum) and 15 No. 1 singles. That's just 2000-2009: in the 90s, he had 19 Top 40 Country singles, including 4 No. 1s, his first of which ("Should a Been a Cowboy") debuted in 1993. Making this prodigious output all the more remarkable is that Keith wrote or co-wrote the staggering majority of these hits (with a huge portion of these with Keith as solo-writer). 

 

In short, Toby Keith was the dominant country star in the first decade of the 2000s, and had an extremely prolific career on either side of that decade. Qualitatively--apart from merely counting record sales--his "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" perfectly captured the post-9/11 mood of the country, and was (for better or worse critically, to the extent anyone cares) one of the iconic songs of the decade. And outside the recording studio, it appears that he was a generous, giving man, playing hundreds of shows for American troops and making generous contributions to charity.

 

As we know, on Monday (2/5), the news broke that he'd passed away from stomach cancer at age 62. 

 

I guess my question is why hasn't Spotify done anything--an in memoriam tab, a playlist, etc.--to honor him (and as they seem to do for other artists)? I dusted off his pre-2000s albums Monday and Tuesday and gave them a listen, and, boy, do they hold up. Certainly, Spotify need not do anything, but they seem to push quite a bit of content (new album alerts, concert alerts, etc.), so it doesn't seem out of bounds to wonder why Spotify hasn't done something in the memory of genuinely one of the  icons of American music in the 21st century.

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