The short answer
Install Turn It Up, Son!, open the popup, find Auto Skip and type the artist or channel you never want to hear again. From then on, whenever something by that name starts playing on YouTube, YouTube Music, Spotify or SoundCloud, the extension jumps to the next track for you.
You add the name once and then you stop thinking about it. No playlist surgery, no thumbs down roulette, no sitting with a finger over the next button waiting for the intro you recognise.
The lazy way: ban whatever is playing right now
Half the time you do not even remember the name. The track just started, you recognised it in two seconds, and now you are annoyed. For that there is a one click ban in the popup: it takes whatever is currently playing and puts it straight on the list. No typing, no copying the spelling of a name you would rather not learn.
This is the button most people end up using. The typed list is for the ones you already know you are done with.
Step by step
- Add Turn It Up, Son! from the Chrome Web Store. It is free, and it runs in Edge and Brave too.
- Open YouTube, YouTube Music, Spotify or SoundCloud and press play on anything.
- Click the extension icon in the toolbar to open the popup.
- Open Auto Skip and turn it on. The browser will ask for permission for the sites the feature runs on, since skipping means reading what is playing and pressing next for you. Accept it.
- Type a name and add it. An artist like "DJ Nightfall", a channel name, whatever form you usually see it in.
- Or skip the typing and press the ban button on the track that is playing right now.
- Go back to listening. When something on the list comes up in autoplay, radio or a recommended queue, it gets skipped before you have to react.
If you ever change your mind about the whole thing, there is a button that clears the entire list at once, and turning Auto Skip off hands the site permission back to the browser.
Artist, channel, or one single track
Three different levels of nuclear, and it is worth knowing which one you want.
- An artist name. The broadest option. Anything credited to that name gets skipped, wherever it turns up.
- A channel name. Useful on YouTube and SoundCloud, where the thing you are sick of is a channel that keeps flooding your recommendations rather than a musician as such. Say a channel called "Grey Static Uploads" that reposts the same four remixes forever.
- A link to one specific track. Paste a YouTube, Spotify or SoundCloud link and only that one track gets skipped. Everything else by the same artist keeps playing. This is the surgical option for the song that got overplayed into the ground while the rest of the catalogue is still fine.
Matching looks at the artist name, the channel name and the track title. Letter case does not matter and accents do not matter, so you do not have to reproduce anyone's stylised spelling exactly to get a match.
One small honest detail about pasted links: to work out which track a link points to, the extension asks that service's public track info endpoint for the title. Only the link goes out, with no identifiers attached. Typed names never leave your machine at all.
The "Skip everywhere" switch
By default, Auto Skip only works on tabs where the extension is actually doing something, meaning the boost is on for that tab. That is deliberate: the extension stays out of the way on tabs you never asked it to touch.
But most listening is not boosted listening. You open a playlist, the volume is fine, you never click the icon, and the banned artist sails right past because as far as the extension is concerned it was not invited to that tab.
That is what Skip everywhere, even without boosting is for. Turn it on and the skipping applies across the whole site whether or not you are boosting anything. If you want the ban list to feel permanent, this is the switch you want on. Leave it off if you would rather the extension only act on tabs you have deliberately picked up.
Your ban list never leaves your computer
The names you add are stored in the browser's local extension storage, on your own machine, and nowhere else. They are not synced, not backed up to anything of mine, not uploaded. There are no servers, no analytics, no accounts and no telemetry anywhere in this extension.
Which also means the list is per browser. Nobody is building a profile out of your grudges, and honestly, nobody should have to know about them.
While you are in there
Auto Skip lives next to the rest of the extension: volume boost up to 700 percent per tab, and a Mix panel with ten presets including Nightcore, Slowed + Reverb, 8D Audio and Phonk, plus a full mixer with Speed, Reverb, Brightness, Muffle, Bass, Vocal, Power and Spin. Skipping what you hate and fixing what you like happen in the same popup.
Go ban somebody
It takes about thirty seconds to set up and then it quietly does its job forever. Free, no account, nothing to configure beyond one list.