Recently, the technical deathcore band known as "Infant Annihilator" was removed from the music streaming service Spotify.

The claim is that the removal was due to numerous complaints about lyrical content and disturbing themes in their music, and as a result their music was deemed too offensive to be in Spotify's catalogue.

Here is the issue, Spotify is silencing an extremely talented group of musicians! Eddie Pickard, Aaron Kitcher, Dickie Allen, and also former vocalist Dan Watson have a huge level of skill and talent. We're talking about a non over commercialized, independent, entirely internet based band that has garnered over 75000 "monthly listeners", according to Spotify.

By choosing to censor this band's music, they have lost the respect of many of the band's loyal fans, and many have already decided to cancel their Spotify Premium service as a result.

Here's my real concern with this. Let's face it, anyone in the extreme metal community knows that compared to innumerable other bands, Infant Annihilator is honestly quite tame. There are hundreds of underground slam or brutal death metal bands with lyrical content and song titles that make Infant Annihilator's lyrics pale in comparison. (Don't misunderstand me, Infant Annihilator is legendary for a reason)

Yes, the lyrical content of most extreme metal is intensely vulgar and disturbing. But by choosing to silence the music itself, Spotify would be literally killing off entire genres of music by continuing the trend of taking away the bands that are deemed to be vulgar. They would be silencing talented up and coming musicians, as well as big names in the community, like Infant Annihilator themselves.

So I ask that anyone who sees this, whether you like extreme metal or not (but especially if you do), PLEASE help us in not tolerating the censorship of a genre that takes real heart and skill to create. These people are musicians! Help them be heard, and don't let the largest music streaming app out there kill them off.