"SPOTIFY," the service itself told us two years ago, "does not permit content whose principal purpose is to incite hatred or violence against people because of their race, religion, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation." It's hard to argue with that as a general philosophy, and yet it's easy to see how hard it is to turn that philosophy into concrete policy. Who's to say what a song's principal purpose is? Who's to decide when a lyric is meant to incite, as opposed to, say, observe, describe, ponder, challenge, satirize or protest? And who's to know where to begin looking for violations among the tens of thousands of tracks uploaded to the service every day, from distributors big and small, from artists around the world, in any number or languages and styles, in all manner of intelligibility and decipherability? Challenged by the BBC, Spotify recently removed about 20 songs that it agreed promoted white power, anti-Semitism or homophobia. (APPLE MUSIC, YOUTUBE and DEEZER also removed all or most of the tracks, the BBC reported.) They included songs that quoted Hitler and celebrated the Holocaust. Some had their titles changed—but not their lyrics—before they were uploaded to streaming services. Some were collected on user-curated playlists of national socialist black metal, a sub-genre connected to neo-Nazism. Finding the songs "required no specialist skills or effort," the BBC's DANIEL KRAEMER and STEVE HOLDEN wrote. One imagines, though, that specialist skills and effort would come in handy in identifying the hundreds if not thousands of songs the BBC probably didn't find. Spotify was not so quick to respond to calls to banish a French rapper, FREEZE CORLEONE, who was dropped by UNIVERSAL MUSIC FRANCE last month for what it said was racist content. His debut album, LMF, originally released by Universal and now released independently, remains on the service, despite lyrics like these, translated from French and highlighted by the SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER: "I arrive determined like Adolf in the 30s." "Build an empire like young Adolf / Determined with great ambitions like young Adolf." DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS shared the text of a Spotify customer support conversation in which the service told a user who asked about the album, "We make music available as the artist intends it to be heard, and that sometimes includes explicit content." Would the response be different if the BBC was asking? Are Freeze Corleone's lyrics different, in context and intent, than the songs on the national socialist black metal playlists? Are they different, in context and intent, from a century's worth of racism, homophobia and sexism in various corners of pop, blues, rock, metal, hip-hop, country and so many other genres? Should that matter? There are 60 million tracks on Spotify, some with lyrics distorted beyond recognition, some with lyrics buried under layers of noise, some with lyrics written in code. Is there any way to police all that? Spotify, which has a shaky history of trying to answer questions like this, says it's always trying to improve its ability to ferret out offensive content. Do you trust it, or any service, to separate the truly hateful from the merely offensive? Do you trust its users? Do you trust yourself?... TAYLOR SWIFT's FOLKLORE is the only album released this year to sell a million copies. The only album released last year that sold a million? Taylor Swift's LOVER... HARRY STYLES, arena investor and consultant... RIP JERRY JEFF WALKER, the outlaw country pioneer from upstate New York who helped transform the Austin, Texas, music scene in the 1970s and wrote this much-covered classic along the way; VIOLA SMITH, the bandleader and "fastest girl drummer in the world" of the 1930s and '40s who fought, somewhat unsuccessfully, for equality in big-band music; and WILLIAM BLINN, who met PRINCE in a Hollywood restaurant in 1983 but wasn't sold on the idea of writing the screenplay for PURPLE RAIN until the Minneapolitan took him to his car and played him a tape of "WHEN DOVES CRY." "I said, ‘Man, you’ve certainly got a foundation,'" Blinn, whose credits also included the TV miniseries ROOTS, remembered years later. "'This can pay off at the end'"... The wild, the innocent and the E Street correction: I wrote on Friday that BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's LETTER TO YOU was recorded live in the studio during the pandemic. In fact, as anyone who paid attention to all the pre-release promo I alluded to would know, he and the E STREET BAND recorded it in November 2019. My apologies.