• by Colin Kirkland , December 30, 2024

As Spotify continues to build out its visual content offerings, the music and audiobook streaming service is attracting sexually explicit videos.

Over the weekend, a Reddit user posted a screenshot of a pornographic video that appeared after searching the app for British rapper M.I.A.

The explicit video no longer appears when searching for M.I.A. But The Verge, which broke the story, reported that it “found others after scrolling through dozens of results in the ‘Video’ tab.”

In line with other popular digital media platforms, Spotify has become committed to building out its video offerings in the past two years.

The company announced at its Newfronts event in May that with more video being created on the app, the company is ready to “connect brands with users when they are looking at their screen.”

In June, Spotify rolled out a new feature that allows podcasters to upload video versions of their programs, in a clear attempt to compete with established social video platforms like YouTube, where video-podcasts have become hugely popular among users.

A handful of Spotify accounts have begun expanding their sexually explicit audio uploads to sexually graphic video content, including accounts labeled as podcasters.

With the number of monthly active users watching video podcasts growing 48% year-over-year, according to the company, and well over half-a-million video podcast episodes having been uploaded since the start of 2024, it is likely that more pornographic video content will be uncovered by users.

As The Verge notes, there is no easy way for users to report explicit or harmful content on the Spotify app.

Spotify says it has since removed the flagged video uploads “due to violation of our policies,” which forbids sexually explicit material, but has not commented on how the videos got past the company's content-moderation processes.