Music streaming platforms such as Spotify hold tremendous power over whether fans listen to a musical artist, while social media boycotts have less impact, according to a new Cornell study.
Jura Liaukonyte, professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and co-authors analyzed several high-profile controversies involving R&B singer R. Kelly, country singer Morgan Wallen, industrial metal band Rammstein and rapper and record producer Sean "Diddy" Combs.
They found no evidence that public backlash against the controversies led to sustained declines in streaming demand when platforms, including Spotify, maintained the visibility of the artists' music. In several cases, scandal-related attention even coincided with short-term increases in streams. The clearest declines appeared when platforms reduced visibility by changing playlists, recommendations and other forms of promotion.
"Our findings underscore the growing power of streaming platforms as cultural intermediaries," said Liaukonyte. "While fans and activists may frame cancellation as a consumer-driven boycott, the economic consequences in our setting hinged on a specific set of editorial and algorithmic decisions by Spotify - highlighting more broadly how much power streaming platforms can wield over an artist's visibility and income."
The paper, "Separating the Artist from the Art: Social Media Boycotts, Platform Sanctions, and Music Consumption" published April 13 in the Journal of Marketing Research. Her co-authors are Daniel Winkler, a former visiting doctoral student at Cornell and now a postdoctoral researcher at University of New South Wales, and Nils Wlömert, professor at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
The clearest example the study examined is R. Kelly. Following renewed attention to allegations and later criminal convictions of child sexual abuse in 2021 and 2022, campaigns such as #MuteRKelly called on listeners and companies to stop supporting his music. While many assumed fans were turning away in protest, the data tells a more nuanced story, the study found.
The research team used Twitter data to document the scope, duration and timeline of more than 11 million tweets related to R. Kelly and the #MuteRKelly social media effort, which urged fans to cease consuming his work and platforms to delist his music.
In response to the #MuteRKelly campaign, Spotify took action. In 2018, Spotify removed his songs from official playlists and curated recommendations; the largest and most sustained drop in R. Kelly's streams coincided with Spotify's decision. The company framed it as an "editorial" choice as part of its own speech and conduct policy. His catalog remained available on the platform, but it became significantly harder to discover unintentionally. As a result, streams fell sharply.
Notably, when Spotify later reversed its formal policy, it chose not to reinstate R. Kelly's songs, creating a rare natural experiment that made the analysis possible.
The researchers estimated that the broader decline translated to approximately $3.2-$4.2 million in revenue loss for Kelly in the U.S. alone, which emphasizes the substantial influence platforms can have on artists' compensation.
"Our research suggests that the drop in R. Kelly's streams was driven primarily by reduced platform visibility after Spotify removed some of his music from playlists and recommendations. For songs that were not removed from Spotify-curated playlists, we found no evidence of a comparable pullback in intentional listening," said Liaukonyte. "In other words, consumption dropped not because listener preferences suddenly changed, but because the platform's discovery tools made it harder for listeners to encounter R. Kelly's music."
To test whether the R. Kelly case was unique, the researƒchers also examined the artists Wallen, Rammstein and Combs. In these cases, social media condemnation and press coverage were widespread, but major platforms largely kept the artists' music in playlists and recommendation systems. The result: no sustained drop in streaming demand. In some instances, listening remained flat or even increased over time. The pattern suggests that moral outrage, absent structural changes to visibility, did not meaningfully alter listener behavior on streaming services.
When streaming platforms remove artists from these systems, without deleting them entirely, their music effectively disappears from many users' everyday listening habits. Conversely, when platforms take no action, outrage cycles tend to fade, while streaming numbers might be temporarily boosted by the increased attention.
The study argues that this dynamic complicates popular narratives about "cancel culture." Public pressure campaigns may influence corporate policies, but they rarely change mass listening behavior on their own, the researchers said.
"We hope our analysis offers an initial step toward better understanding how platforms and social movements together shape the conditions under which listeners separate the artist from the art, a question that future work can continue to explore in broader settings," said Liaukonyte.
Sarah Magnus-Sharpe is director of public relations and communications at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
