Last week Neil Young and Joni Mitchell asked Spotify to pull their music from their platform because of Podcast regular Joe Rogan’s claims about Covid-19.
Rogan made frequent false and inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and vaccines on his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Young said, “they can either have Rogan or Young,” and this situation has led to people hating on Spotify, and #deletespotify went viral.
If you look at it from a different perspective, this situation doesn’t hurt Spotify since Spotify is the leading streaming and listening app for music. Many artists get their money from Spotify streams. People listen to their catalogs on Spotify, so if an artist takes their music off Spotify, it’s terrible for the artist because now they don’t get the money they used to get from Spotify.
Both the artists and Spotify are in a unique situation. According to estimates from Billboard.com, Young and Mitchell are giving up more than 10% of their annual revenue by pulling their music off Spotify. Also, Spotify can’t take down Joe Rogan’s podcast since he made a 100-million-dollar deal with Spotify.
The situation is not over yet, but this is all the news in public right now.