Today's Evil Beet Gossip

Spotify is removing Neil Young music over Joe Rogan

A bit misleading as a title, so I apologize. Joe Rogan himself made no threat or ask for nothing to be removed.

As we reported before, Neil Young took Umbridge with the content of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that airs exclusively on Spotify.

So aggravated with Rogans continued use of misinformation surrounding Covid 19 and it’s guidelines, he felt he had to take a stand.  Had to see if he could prevent any more untruths from getting out.

So this week Neil wrote an open letter to Spotify saying it was him or Rogan.  Either pull Rogans show or pull my catalog of songs from the streamer.

Spotify has spoken.

“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators,” it said.

“We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.”

The financials in the game: Spotify pays Joe Rogan a staggering $100m for his contract with them. Neil Young says that 60% of his streamed music comes from Spotify.  So he’s taking a real hit there.

As for whether any other musicians plan to stand with Young…

Steve Sladkowski, the guitarist for Canadian rock band Pup, gave one explanation why, tweeting, “It rocks that Neil can take his music off [Spotify] but the fact remains that the vast majority of us can’t afford to do that because the (very meagre) royalties are one of the few ways to cobble together any semblance of a living.”