It’s been an instructive morning on the internet. We’ve learned that women can’t multi-task – only men can – and that they’re “pretty shit” at making decisions.

That women don’t like to be asked: “they want to be told”, and that “a woman who is understanding and kind and who respects you does not exist unless you force her to be that way”. Oh, and that once a man has slept with a woman he is “now in charge”.

No, Music Ally hasn’t turned into a weirdo misogynist manfluencer on the grift. We’ve just been listening to one talk in his ‘PHD’ course on Spotify. ‘Pimping Hoes Degree’ since you ask.

Yes, Andrew Tate is at it again, and the streaming firm is under pressure over the availability of his courses on its service. Published as podcasts, they date back to September 2023, with the most recent batch uploaded – with a dollop of irony that Alanis Morisette can see from space – around Valentine’s Day this year.

A petition calling for Spotify to remove the courses is picking up steam on the Change·org website, with nearly 33,000 signatures at the time of writing. The petition was launched by Renee Chopping, a trauma counsellor who works with survivors of sex trafficking.

She took aim at “courses that actively teach men how to manipulate, control, and profit from the exploitation of women” adding that “despite multiple allegations of rape, sex trafficking, and abuse – including trafficking of minors – Spotify continues to give Tate a megaphone.”

“His courses, some requiring a paid subscription to access, show men how to recruit and exploit women for pornography, under the guise of ‘business advice’. Spotify directly profits from these lessons in predation.”

Spotify declined to comment when contacted by Music Ally, but we understand that the company has removed a few episodes that it judged violated its platform policies.

Spotify is also sticking to its principle that it does not remove content for ‘off-platform’ behaviour – a policy that dates back to 2018, when Spotify was heavily criticised for de-playlisting music by artists on the grounds of ‘hateful conduct’ (off-platform) rather than the content of their songs.

That policy u-turn addressed concerns that Black artists were being particularly targeted by the ‘hateful conduct’ policy. Yet the principle it established about not moderating content based on off-platform behaviour is what’s keeping Andrew Tate’s courses up now.

Some thoughts on all this. First, this isn’t just a Spotify story. There are plenty of Tate’s ‘motivational’ speeches on Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts too, with those platforms making their own decisions about whether individual episodes violate their policies.

Second, though, it IS Spotify under pressure with the petition, and with the growing number of angry comments on the podcast episodes from people threatening to cancel their subscriptions. Like it or not, as the biggest audio-streamer, Spotify is taking the reputational hit from being seen to give Tate a platform.

And third, this is now the way of things for any music service that has expanded into speech audio, at a particularly charged moment in culture.

Music has its censorship-controversy moments – YouTube takedowns of drill-music videos being one recent example. But podcasts, audiobooks, courses? All are key cogs in the grifting wheel of Tate and others, who will push and push the boundaries and policies of these platforms as far as they can.

Reviewing individual episodes for takedowns is the current approach, but more-openly discussing those moderation decisions and addressing criticism may become a necessity too.