We ask them, we tweet at them, we cajole them, we corner them into apologizing, and then when they do, we question their motives and their sincerity. Doesn't sound fair, does it? What do we want from LADY GAGA, CHANCE THE RAPPER and all of these people? It's a reasonable question. And there are reasonable answers. Maybe we want the artist who apologized in 2019 for working with R. KELLY in 2013 to still be sorry in 2020. Maybe we don't want the apology to end with the tweet or the INSTAGRAM post. Maybe we want the apologizers to continue asking—and answering—difficult questions about themselves. Maybe we as a community want a public conversation about why so many of us, including we who are asking and tweeting the questions, have enabled people and things that we should not have enabled. Maybe we want to stop the cycle. Maybe we know it's going to take time, and a lot of talk, and a lot of action, and a lot of confronting difficult questions about ourselves and each other. BRITTANY SPANOS and DANIELLE BUTLER on the meaning of, and the trouble with, celebrity apologies... There continues to be no apology, no explanation, no statement, not even the words "no" and "comment," from RCA/SONY, R. Kelly's label home. The #MuteRKelly movement protested outside Sony headquarters in New York Wednesday, and promises to bring the protest to the GRAMMY AWARDS next month. I'm trying to think of another example of a major company publicly ignoring—not denying, not deflecting, not delaying, but simply erasing—a scandal like this. There was an anonymously sourced item in TMZ earlier this week saying RCA/Sony isn't funding or releasing any Kelly music and Kelly is "pissed," and though the implication was that the sources were in Kelly's camp, it's easy to imagine the label feeding such a story to TMZ. But the official response, the one the company wants us to hear, is silence. Isn't it a little late for that?... Can someone smarter than me explain the response from SPOTIFY's head of country music to ROLLING STONE's observation that the service's signature country playlist currently has exactly one woman on it? At the moment, there are as many EDM bands on HOT COUNTRY—which is to country as RAPCAVIAR is to hip-hop—as there are women. That will change, Spotify's John Marks tells reporter JOSEPH HUDAK. "We understand the concern," he says, "and have been working diligently with artists and the industry to ensure that we provide great opportunities to showcase great female country artists when possible." That's a welcome promise. My question is what might that work involve? Spotify doesn't have to sign or license artists for Hot Country. It doesn't need contracts. It doesn't need someone to write, record or mix a song. It doesn't need to pay a dime to anyone except the in-house programmer who could, in the time you're reading this sentence, swap out one of those three FILMORE songs or two KEITH URBAN songs for a MADDIE & TAE song or a CARRIE UNDERWOOD song or any currently hot country songs by women in Spotify's bottomless catalog. So why not do that? This problem, it should be noted, is not a Spotify exclusive. It's an ongoing issue across all country programming, especially on country radio. And it's a perfect chance for a streaming company that's trying to make a mark on Nashville to lead rather than follow... Um, no, COLIN KAEPERNICK apparently is not cool with TRAVIS SCOTT performing at the SUPER BOWL... [ ... ... ... ... ]... To retweet, or not to retweet, CARDI B... RIP the GERMS' LORNA DOOM.