What happened to artist Grigory Leps?

[jckeatley]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Any

Operating System

Any

My Question or Issue

I had been listening to a Russian artist Grigory Leps (Григорий Лепс).  Suddenly a couple of days ago, his content began disappearing, until only duet songs he had sung with another artist, or compilation albums that contained one of his songs were the only content of his out there.  He is a very popular artist in Russia.

After a bit of searching, I found that he is also the target of sanctions (!) by the U. S. government.  This would be like someone sanctioning Frank Sinatra because they hated the U. S.  I saw where a representative of Leps a few months ago said that Spotify was their least favorite platform to publish music.

Anyway, my question is this: Was this Leps' decision or Spotify's decision, or was it mutual?  Also, is Spotify going to be getting into the politics of enforcing the U. S. government's sanctions now?

[Alexalsa]

I was literally wondering the same thing. I noticed a lot of other Russian artists also disappearing on Spotify, this sucks because no music is really bringing me joy anymore...

[jckeatley]

Well, I noticed that both Amazon Music and Apple Music still have Grigory
Leps and many other Russian artists. Thinking of switching to one of those.
Yandex Music is not available here. In any case, I probably wouldn't be
able to get them a payment in rubles.

I don't know if this is a case of the other two banning as well, but they
just haven't caught up. Also, Spotify is not American but Swedish, which
makes this more confusing.

[Quelcune]

I just found out that Grigory Leps disappeared  from Spotify. What a pity! I love both GL and Okean Elzy, a Ukrainian rock band, I would have preferred Spotify to be neutral, it's not a political arena, it's just a streaming platform!

[dasha278]

I also noticed this today and they’ve also removed Lyube! I’m thinking of switching to another platform.

[benand103]

Leps is one of the greatest musicians in the Russian language whose musical compositions are on the level of Queen, U2, Bryan Adams etc. 

Spotify is useless to me without him. 

I've given notice and will move if he isn't restored pretty quickly. 

[Gackolpz]

Lyube, GL, Denis Maidanov, and Oleg Gazmanov have been removed from Spotify. But what makes this fishy is the fact that instead of the song being darkened and unplayable, all the song data is completely removed, the artist name, the song name, the album at, everything is gone, which is very unusual and seems to be targeted at Russian artists. Because of this, I am compelled to state that Spotify is removing artists for political reasons.