Joni Mitchell and Neil Young have quit the platform in protest of vaccine misinfo on Joe Rogan’s podcast
Have you been keeping track of the comings and (more to the point) goings at Spotify lately? The platform has now released a statement in response to Joni Mitchell and Neil Young pulling their music from the streaming service over vaccine misinformation on Joe Rogan’s podcast. We have all the latest, plus some poignant backstory, below…
Neil Young leaves Spotify in protest
The controversy around vaccine misinformation on Spotify hit a fever pitch last week, when the platform announced it was removing Neil Young’s catalog of music. Young had published (then removed) an open letter saying that unless Spotify stemmed the vaccine misinfo coming from Joe Rogan’s podcast, he’d remove his music from the platform. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” he wrote.
Spotify responded, choosing to back Rogan over the veteran star. Young is expected to lose 60 percent of his streaming revenue as a result. In a follow-up message, Young said that while it is “a huge loss for [his] record company to absorb,” he was pressing ahead with the move, because he “could not continue to support Spotify’s life-threatening misinformation to the music-loving public.”
Spotify said it regretted Young’s decision, but hoped “to welcome him back soon.” As a measure of its dedication to Rogan, the music behemoth paid $100 million in 2020 for the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. With an estimated audience of 11 million, it’s one of the most popular pods in the world.
A poignant backstory
After Young announced his departure, March For Science re-posted some fascinating insight from Anna Loren, the news director of New Zealand’s largest news site, Stuff. Loren pointed out some key elements of Young’s personal history which may explain his firm stance against Spotify:
“The thing about Neil Young is that he contracted polio as a child in the ‘50s, years before a vaccine was available, ” she wrote.
“After being released from hospital, he had to relearn how to walk. Polio left him permanently disabled, contributed to a serious anxiety disorder and affects his life to this day.
Neil also has epilepsy, as does his daughter. His two sons have cerebral palsy. He wrote a whole album, Trans, as a way to communicate with one of them. He & his wife also founded a nonprofit, The Bridge School, for kids with severe disabilities. Every year Neil organises a benefit concert for The Bridge School.
All of this is to say, if you’re looking for a celeb who knows about the importance of vaccines and who is well-educated in the sphere of health and disability, you can’t do much better than Neil Young.”
Fellow polio survivor Joni Mitchell follows suit
After the news about Young’s protest blew up, Joni Mitchell swiftly followed suit, also removing her music from Spotify. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” she wrote on her website, continuing: “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”
Mitchell, who has 3.7m monthly listeners on the platform, is the first high-profile musician to take such decisive action following Young’s exit. It seems likely that she was influenced by the fact that, like Young, she was stricken with polio as a child, and spent weeks in the hospital.
British doctor and author Rachel Clarke tweeted: “Both Neil Young & Joni Mitchell … know painfully well how much harm, suffering & avoidable death anti-vaxxers can cause.”
Spotify and Rogan respond to complaints
Following Young and Mitchell’s statements, Spotify’s chief executive Daniel Ek, who is also one of its founders, wrote in an open letter posted on January 31: “We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users. In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
As the New York Times notes, Ek didn’t mention Joe Rogan specifically, and nor did he directly address a written complaint from a group of more than 200 professors and public health officials who recently demanded that Spotify crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. The group’s letter highlighted a recent episode of Rogan’s podcast which featured Dr. Robert Malone, and apparently included “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines.”
Meanwhile, in a nearly 10-minute video posted on Instagram, Rogan said he’d be prepared to feature “more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones.”
“My point of doing this is always just to create interesting conversations and ones that I hope people enjoy,” he added.
