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.