Until last week, Spotify-using fans of Neil Young could access a vast 54-year catalogue of songs, which attracted more than 6 million listeners a month. Now all that remains are appearances on compilations and, for some reason, a 1989 live album. Enraged by what he saw as the promotion of “life-threatening Covid misinformation” on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the Canadian singer-songwriter issued an ultimatum: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
As Young surely knew, Spotify’s choice was a foregone conclusion. Rogan’s show, which the streaming service acquired for $100m in 2020, is its most popular podcast, with an average listenership of 11 million per episode. In its first month, it accounted for 4.5% of all podcast listening on Spotify worldwide. For Spotify, which is banking on podcasts to drive subscriptions, he is a star of the magnitude of Adele.
He has also become explosively controversial. Young’s walkout, followed later in the week by Joni Mitchell’s exit in solidarity, was prompted by an open letter calling on Spotify to counter Covid misinformation after Rogan recorded an interview with Dr Robert Malone, a virologist who has become a rightwing media star for his opposition to vaccines. The director general of the WHO tweeted in support of Young’s boycott: “We all have a role to play to end this pandemic and infodemic.”
Young, the most ornery of all boomer rock legends, is the perfect antagonist. He is an obsessive audiophile who temporarily removed his music from all streaming services in 2015 and a purist whose 1988 single This Note’s for You decried licensing songs to commercials. As a survivor of childhood polio, he might also have particularly strong opinions about vaccines. What’s more, he can afford to take the considerable financial hit. He has a loyal fanbase that will pay for top-dollar boxsets and subscriptions to his website archive. Last year, he sold 50% of the rights to his song catalogue to the investment fund Hipgnosis for a reported $150m. For less comfortable artists, Spotify could be too big to quit.
In the opposite corner is Rogan, a former comedian and martial artist who has recorded close to 1,800 episodes since launching his podcast in 2009. His guests have included Kanye West, Elon Musk, Quentin Tarantino and Bernie Sanders. But he has also entertained figures from the “alt-right” such as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the Proud Boys co-founder Gavin McInnes and the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Rogan’s politics are broadly contrarian with a rightward skew. He is a bullish libertarian who initially backed Sanders in the 2020 election but ended up preferring Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Last April, Rogan said that if you are young, fit and healthy, then you do not need a vaccine, attracting criticism from Biden’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci. “I’m not an anti-vax person,” Rogan responded. “I believe they’re safe and encourage many people to take them.” Yet he has still booked anti-vaccine guests.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Spotify has never claimed to have an ideological commitment to free speech. In 2017, following a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, it began removing music by “hate bands”. The following year, it introduced a somewhat incoherent “hate and hateful conduct” policy, designed to promote “openness, diversity, tolerance and respect”. Spotify may be deeply inconsistent but it has established a precedent that it takes responsibility for the material it serves up. Last week, a spokesperson boasted that Spotify had “removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic”, a startling number.
Not Rogan’s though. Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, has framed his hands-off approach as an anti-censorship issue, telling US news website Axios last year that Rogan was no different to a big-name rapper: “And we don’t dictate what they’re putting in their songs either.”
Musicians have had an ambivalent relationship with Spotify since its US launch in 2011. Some are grateful to it for saving the music industry after a decade of digital piracy and plummeting sales while others claim its measly royalty rates favour only the megastar elite. The pandemic has re-energised its critics. Abruptly deprived of concert income, many artists looked again at their royalty statements and demanded a fairer deal.
The Young-Rogan contretemps is a PR headache of a different order, one that exposes the tensions inherent in Spotify’s aggressive move into podcasting and decision to make music a subset of audio. Now artists and subscribers are effectively funding politically inflammatory content in the middle of a global health crisis. The rappers mentioned by Ek haven’t embraced Covid misinformation and would not reach 11 million listeners if they did. For a company proud of its progressive record, doubling down on Rogan on the pretext of a sudden dedication to free speech appears disingenuous, cynical and greedy.
While still the largest streaming service by far, Spotify has been slowly losing market share to its rivals. Podcasts were meant to reverse that slide but they could make things worse by thrusting Spotify on to the culture-war frontline. While the company has presumably calculated that the financial benefit of sticking with Rogan outweighs the reputational cost, many users have cancelled their premium subscriptions. “The company’s bullshit is just too much to bear now,” tweeted the popular YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano.
The backlash is calling into question what exactly Spotify has become, or was all along. The US musician Damon Krukowski tweeted that Spotify “are not in the music business, they are a tech platform, and however they can get people to spend more time on the platform, that’s where they will go… Spotify is not interested in the future of music.”
Not for the first time in his maverick career, Neil Young has opened a can of worms. This one might be the biggest of them all.
• Dorian Lynskey is the author of The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
