With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. Here, for the record, is the company’s statement:
It says it takes all this stuff very seriously, and routinely examines content on its service to see if it violates content policies, which it has yet to disclose publicly. Spotify will take issue with that characterization, of course. It would have to take much, much more than the absence of a legacy act that hasn’t released a popular song since 1989 to get it to change course. Spotify is betting billions of dollars that podcasting will be a meaningful business, and Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the world. So unless there are a lot of people like my brother-in-law, expect Spotify to do what it has done every time people have complained about their deal with Rogan: nothing. To his credit, Young - a famously cantankerous character who has complained about streaming for years - is clear-eyed about what his pullout will mean: “I sincerely hope that other artists can make a move, but I can’t really expect that to happen,” he wrote on his website this week. Taylor Swift has fought with Spotify, Apple, and a music manager who bought the rights to her catalog, but those disputes were all about money and control, not ideology or vaccines. The Nixon administration, for instance, put John Lennon under FBI surveillance and at one point tried to deport him because of his work protesting the Vietnam War.īut that level of activism is almost completely absent from today’s lineup of popular musicians, who will sometimes tweet about things they don’t like but generally leave it at that. Back when Neil Young was making popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, famous musicians routinely made political arguments, and sometimes even put their own livelihoods at risk in doing so. It’s possible, of course, that things could change. Here’s a competing data point – a list of prominent musicians following Young’s lead and pulling their catalogs from Spotify as well:
(For the record, you can still find Young’s music on Amazon, Apple, and every other streaming platform.) Lies being sold for money” - has hit home for him. Young’s argument - that by paying for Rogan’s podcast, “Spotify has become the home of life-threatening Covid misinformation. Here’s one data point: My brother-in-law just texted me asking for recommendations for a new streaming service. Sure enough, the list of people criticizing Spotify over its Rogan deal - and the content Rogan has put out since then - includes Spotify’s own employees, who complained that his podcast is transphobic, and 270 doctors and other health experts, who wrote an open letter saying Rogan’s podcasts were “mass-misinformation events” that have been “provoking distrust in science and medicine” during the pandemic, for hosting the likes of Robert Malone, an anti-vaxxer who’s been banned by Twitter.Īnd now rock star Neil Young, who said those doctors’ open letter opened his eyes to the “dangerous life-threatening Covid falsehoods found in Spotify programming,” has taken his music off the service in protest. Because a big part of Rogan’s appeal - we don’t know how big his audience is, but double-digit millions seems reasonable - is courting controversy by interviewing the likes of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Other times it’s really easy: Back in the spring of 2020, it was incredibly obvious that by paying Joe Rogan a ton of money for the exclusive rights to his podcast, Spotify would inevitably find itself under fire. Sometimes it’s hard to predict the future.
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