The Twitter account PopCrave has recently brought to my attention the music streaming site, Melovaz, that’s based out of Iran. Aside from obviously ripping off a few Spotify playlists and covers, it seems like your average streaming site.
Except for one little detail.
This site, for some reason, chooses to edit every female artist or model off of every piece of album, single, or playlist art on their site.
Men are allowed to stay on the covers. Women are not.
This leads to some strange looking duet covers, like this one for Please Me by Cardi B and Bruno Mars that ends up with just a moody looking Bruno lamenting the fact that his hip comes to a sharp corner and he has no right half of his body.
The truth hurts, and so does this edit.
Lizzo just took a DNA test and it turns out she’s 100% gone from this album cover. Okay, maybe it’s more like 90% gone, since you can see just a hint of her neck down by the “L” in her name.
Some of them are pretty well done.
This looks like it could just be an alternate album cover for Taylor Swift’s latest album. Maybe there’s some symbolism there in having what kind of just looks like a ghost floating in the middle where Taylor used to be.
If you ignore the flag, this one’s pretty convincing too.
Just a guy on his sailboat staring moodily off into the distance. They did a better job than I’d expect of removing Lana Del Rey’s hand from his back, too.
Some of them are… not so good.
I loved the newest version of A Star Is Born , where Bradley Cooper falls in love with an amorphous grey blob that envelops him and his guitar whole. Such a touching story,
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It’s not immediately clear why they’re doing this, or who specifically is behind the decision.
It’s not even just the more scandalous artwork that’s getting removed, like shirtless Ariana Grande here.
Even women who are fully clothed and moderately dressed are getting clone-tooled out of existence.
I know it’s done with a cloning tool, by the way, based on the mistake they made on this one.
As if Celine Dion hasn’t been through enough, when they wiped her out they accidentally took the “C” from courage and the “ON” from Dion to make it look like this song is actually called “Con Courage.”
It takes a lot of con courage to mess with this French Canadian icon.
Whether it’s done successfully or poorly, it’s definitely weird.
It’s unclear why they would even include these songs and albums on their streaming site if they had an issue with these female artists appearing on album covers.
It’s also unlikely the artists themselves are getting a cut of the profits made off the streams.
Some have speculated that this is due to Iran’s laws on head coverings.
In Iran, it has been illegal for a woman to appear in public without a hijab since 1979. However, the streaming service has not commented on their decision to alter the album artwork.
Rapper Iggy Azalea, whose albums appeared on the site with her removed, tweeted about this issue.
She pointed out that if modesty or vulgarity was the issue, it was strange to have her music available on the site at all, given the content of her lyrics.
Some fans found the humor in this strange situation.
While censorship itself isn’t funny, the strangeness of this streaming site simply erasing women from album art instead of creating new, blank album art is absurd enough to create a few jokes.
Even though many fans were against the concept of this censorship, they found the images themselves pretty funny.
There is something absurd enough to be funny about seeing the floating pink cowboy hat on Lady Gaga’s album cover, even when you’re marveling at sexism.
Someone, obviously, made an ‘Avengers: Endgame’ reference.
And honestly, especially on the A Star Is Born cover, it does kind of look like that. I mean, Bradley Cooper was also IN Endgame , so that also makes sense.
Some people also took offense at the quality of the editing.
It’s not enough to remove women from album covers, so they have to do it poorly, too?
There were a lot of people who didn’t find it funny at all.
While this censorship and editing is definitely ridiculous, it’s worth noting that erasing women from their work is probably not the way this website planned on getting much of its traffic.
