Saudi Press

Saudi Arabia and the world
Friday, Oct 03, 2025

Spotify Isn’t Really About the Music Anymore

Spotify Isn’t Really About the Music Anymore

In choosing Joe Rogan over Neil Young, the company has made its new priorities clear to listeners.
The questions that arise in the face of any boycott effort—whether against an unethical retailer, a disgraced performer, or an exploitative employer—can be paralyzing. We live in a world of compromise and wickedness, built of systems guided not by virtue but by profit. So why, the boycotter must be asked, draw the line here? We also live in a world in which individuals rarely ever wield more power than institutions. Can any one person’s resistance matter?

Those questions are, in the case of musicians asking to pull their music from Spotify to protest vaccine misinformation, answerable. They’re doing something significant, and they’re doing something that can make a difference, simply by drawing attention to what Spotify has become: a content publisher whose main incentive to act responsibly will come from public scrutiny.

On Monday, Rolling Stone reported that the 76-year-old rock titan Neil Young sent a letter telling his management team and record label that Spotify would have to choose between hosting his music and hosting the hugely popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Young’s letter was inspired by another letter, signed by 270 scientists, doctors, and other health professionals earlier in January. It alleged that Rogan had broadcast inaccuracies about COVID-19, including by hosting guests who plugged ivermectin as an effective treatment and by portraying vaccines as unnecessary for young people. (Rogan has said that he is “not an anti-vaxx person.”) Spotify, Young wrote, could “have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify picked the podcaster over the musician. On the Beach, “Old Man,” and most of the rest of Young’s gorgeous, warbling catalog as a lead artist is no longer available to Spotify’s 381 million users (though they can still gently blast Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). The Joe Rogan Experience, a chat show about such subjects as health and society and mixed martial arts and aliens, remains available. In a statement, the company said that it wants “all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” asserted that it already removed “over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic,” and expressed regrets about Young’s choice.

Rogan has been, for some years now, arguably the most influential podcaster on the planet. So Young’s move might seem futile, like a man protesting the weather, or self-defeating, like a novelist not wanting to be on the same bookstore shelves as Tom Clancy. But though no perfect analogy exists when it comes to Spotify—streaming is a new and evolving phenomenon—the better way to think of Young might be this: He’s like an advertiser pulling out from Fox News because of its continued reliance on Tucker Carlson.

Spotify, after all, is not a neutral distributor for independently generated works. Though its public statement about Young mentions “balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators,” Rogan is not just exercising his liberty to broadcast on Spotify. He is likely enjoying the more than $100 million the company reportedly paid as part of a May 2020 deal that made The Joe Rogan Experience’s past and future episodes available only on Spotify. The podcast is exclusive content—and prominent exclusive content at that.

The company’s deal with Rogan was part of a larger strategic shift whose implications listeners may not fully understand. Since launching in 2008, Spotify has transformed the music world by helping make on-demand streaming a reality for millions of listeners and rescuing the industry’s coffers from a years-long decline. But Spotify pays most of its revenues from songs back to labels and artists and has rarely turned a profit. In 2019, the company announced a new focus on “audio,” meaning recorded books, live chats, and the booming medium of podcasts. Spotify began paying out millions in exclusive deals with such creators as Rogan, the Obamas, Bill Simmons’s Ringer network, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Spotify’s bet on podcasts has attracted subscribers and ad dollars, but Young’s protest of Rogan highlights one downside of it: Spotify has responsibility for its content, and its content may be controversial. Policing speech is, to be sure, not an entirely new challenge for Spotify. The company has removed racist music and briefly attempted to punish artists who had been accused of personal misconduct. Its recent statement about Young said that it has also taken action against a number of COVID-related podcasts (though the statement didn’t quite spell out why). But when you’ve paid a fortune for a podcast, pulling episodes for any reason is not going to be a routine, or attractive, proposition.

What’s more, the company now finds itself where few companies intend to be: as a figure in the culture wars. For years, musicians have spoken out about Spotify’s technology and business practices, but those complaints have rarely reached the level of visibility that Young’s now have. That is surely because Young is taking a stand on the highly politicized issues of vaccine skepticism, leading conservative commentators to defend Rogan with familiar rhetoric about cancel culture. Competing hashtags such as #SpotifyDeleted and #ThanksJoeRogan are now trending.

Perhaps this is the start of a movement. Last night, Young’s legendary pal Joni Mitchell announced that she, too, wanted to secede from Spotify “in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities.” The withdrawal of two of the most important living musicians obviously dents the company’s value proposition, but the bigger impact may simply be that an alarm has been sounded. Spotify faces strong competition for capturing the world’s eardrums, and Apple, Amazon, Tidal, Bandcamp, and the local record store can make a new pitch: Spend your dollars on music, not on dangerous nonsense.
Newsletter

Related Articles

Saudi Press
0:00
0:00
Close
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
UK, Canada, and Australia Officially Recognise Palestine in Historic Shift
New Eye Drops Show Promise in Replacing Reading Glasses for Presbyopia
Dubai Property Boom Shows Strain as Flippers Get Buyer’s Remorse
Top AI Researchers Are Heading Back to China as U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace
JWST Data Brings TRAPPIST-1e Closer to Earth-Like Habitability
UAE-US Stargate Project Poised to Make Abu Dhabi a Global AI Powerhouse
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Kuwait opens bidding for construction of three cities to ease housing crunch.
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
Turkish authorities seize leading broadcaster amid fraud and tax investigation
Qatari prime minister says Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages
Apple Introduces Ultra-Thin iPhone Air, Enhanced 17 Series and New Health-Focused Wearables
Big Oil Slashes Jobs and Investments Amid Prolonged Low Crude Prices
Social Media Access Curtailed in Turkey After CHP Calls for Rallies Following Police Blockade of Istanbul Headquarters
Did the Houthis disrupt the internet in the Middle East? Submarine cables cut in the Red Sea
Gold Could Reach Nearly $5,000 if Fed Independence Is Undermined, Goldman Sachs Warns
Uruguay, Colombia and Paraguay Secure Places at 2026 World Cup
Trump Administration Advances Plans to Rebrand Pentagon as Department of War Instead of the Fake Term Department of Defense
Tether Expands into Gold Sector with Profit-Driven Diversification
Trump’s New War – and the ‘Drug Tyrant’ Fearing Invasion: ‘1,200 Missiles Aimed at Us’
At the Parade in China: Laser Weapons, 'Eagle Strike,' and a Missile Capable of 'Striking Anywhere in the World'
Information Warfare in the Age of AI: How Language Models Become Targets and Tools
Israeli Airstrike in Yemen Kills Houthi Prime Minister
After the Shock of Defeat, Iranians Yearn for Change
YouTube Altered Content by Artificial Intelligence – Without Permission
Iran Faces Escalating Water Crisis as Protests Spread
More Than Half a Million Evacuated as Typhoon Kajiki Heads for Vietnam
HSBC Switzerland Ends Relationships with Over 1,000 Clients from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Qatar, and Egypt
Sharia Law Made Legally Binding in Austria Despite Warnings Over 'Incompatible' Values
Dogfights in the Skies: Airbus on Track to Overtake Boeing and Claim Aviation Supremacy
Tim Cook Promises an AI Revolution at Apple: "One of the Most Significant Technologies of Our Generation"
Are AI Data Centres the Infrastructure of the Future or the Next Crisis?
Miles Worth Billions: How Airlines Generate Huge Profits
Zelenskyy Returns to White House Flanked by European Allies as Trump Pressures Land-Swap Deal with Putin
Beijing is moving into gold and other assets, diversifying away from the dollar
Cristiano Ronaldo Makes Surprise Stop at New Hong Kong Museum
Zelenskyy to Visit Washington after Trump–Putin Summit Yields No Agreement
×