S2E05: Spotify, Neil Young, and Joe Rogan Essay

In the last week of January 2022, Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify, citing Spotify's hosting of Joe Rogan's podcast as something intolerable, because Joe Rogan has spread misinformation about COVID and vaccines. 

Spotify, not Joe Rogan, was Young’s target because in 2020, Spotify paid $100 million to make Rogan’s podcast -- one of the most popular in the world, with an alleged 11 million listeners -- as a Spotify exclusive. 

Joni Mitchell and Neil’s sometime bandmates Crosby, Stills, & Nash also pulled their music. So did several other reasonably well-known podcasts.

Many other musicians are also using this issue as an opportunity to bash Spotify and complain about a range of perceived injustices. I saw artists I like and people I know saying they were going to pull their music, or delete their Spotify accounts, or both.

But the situation is more complicated than you might think.

Prior to Spotify's exclusive buyout, Rogan's podcast was everywhere. Apple, Amazon, Google, Stitcher...every platform carried it, because it was immensely popular. None of those services had any issue with Rogan, despite Rogan’s often-inflammatory and offensive content, which has been posted 3 or 4 times a week for 11 years. Rogan has been pushing misinformation and bad advice since the pandemic began, and really, since he started. 

And all of the other services are still hosting content that is "objectionable" -- there are plenty of podcasts that aren't Rogan-sized spreading disinformation or hate speech. There is plenty of objectionable music up as well, whether it is Nazi punk or ISIS-core or porno ambient or whatever.

Abandoning Spotify for these other services is hardly a great moral statement. They were all happy to have Rogan and are happy to have all this other content. It costs them next to nothing and brings in listeners and revenue.

It is difficult for me to see much of this controversy as anything other than everyone else trying to attack the market leader with whatever happens to be convenient. 

Shortly before the Rogan thing blew up, people were trying to summon outrage because Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine was complaining about the lyrics database Spotify had licensed.

In fact, in 2018, Spotify was criticized for -- get this -- trying to say they would take down content they thought was harmful! Back then, Spotify tried out a poorly designed pair of policies around “hateful content” and “hateful conduct” before they walked both of them back after threats of content takedowns from artists. 

Spotify had been claiming, back then, that they would remove, or at least not promote, music that, in their words:

…expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability.

Their intent was likely to give themselves a way to remove content that was attracting bad press. But…there's a lot of music that could fall under their stated policy. Hip-hop -- one of Spotify's most popular genres -- has a number of acts who have lyrics that are anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and/or endorse violence against women. There are plenty of rock acts, too. 

Spotify went a step further. They said they'd even block or at least refuse to promote (non-offensive) content from people who had behaved badly -- so-called "hateful conduct". Their test case here was R. Kelly. Presumably they were trying to give themselves a way to pull down content by whoever is currently screwing up so that Spotify could avoid any kind of boycott from other artists.

You can see how this quickly becomes a problem. Is Spotify going to decide what crimes merit banishment? Any crime? Felonies only, or misdemeanors? What about things that are crimes in one country but not another? What about allegations, rather than convictions? And so on.

Look, there are plenty of artists who have confessed to or endorsed all sorts of bad conduct in interviews. They have boasted about treating women poorly. Frequently abused drugs and alcohol. Driven faster than the speed limit. Driven while intoxicated, and/or killed people in drunk driving accidents. Committed crimes ranging from selling drugs to gun violence to murder. 

Hell, Dr. Dre -- one of the founders of Beats, which built a music service that became the core of Apple Music -- has a history of beating women. Does that mean no artist should put their music up on Apple Music? Should anyone use that service?

And if you want to include artists who have just been accused of bad behavior, well, that list gets long fast.

My point here is that back in 2018, Spotify made some attempts to be selective about their content, and the result was bad press and artists yanking music off the service. 4 years later, they are trying to do the opposite -- host everything -- and the result is the same. 

If you ask me, the bigger problem is more about building platforms with no accountability for what they host. If you build a service -- YouTube, Spotify, Steam, whatever -- that lets anyone upload and sell anything, with no content review, you are going to have bad, toxic stuff being sold on that platform.

These platforms tend to argue they are so big they must allow everything, so every voice can be heard. This is bullshit, and a way for them to justify not having to curate, moderate, or review any of that content. Because doing those things -- being actually responsible and selective about what you host and transmit -- costs money, and requires companies to make decisions about what their values are, and just might preclude them from making a buck off of the next Minecraft or the next big controversy.

There are also people who will argue these companies should not be in the business of so-called "censorship". Let's be clear: it is not censorship. It is companies deciding what they stand for. There's nothing stopping Joe Rogan or anyone else, for that matter, from building their own website and hosting content on their own. Nothing at all. Nobody is censored anymore. 

The idea that everyone is owed a place on a big platform is precisely the problem of the 21st century. We put Lil Tay and Joe Rogan and your crazy racist uncle and me in the same frame as the New York Times. 

Curation and selectivity is not censorship. It is the essence of branding and audience definition. 

I am sure Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and all the other video services could make a mint if they added a porn option and tier. But they don't. Why not? 

At the same time, I am somewhat sympathetic to the services, which have long been the target of uninformed and unfair criticism and lazy reporting. 

Spotify is also stuck. For every artist like Neil Young demanding they take Joe Rogan down or else, there’s going to be a Ted Nugent demanding they keep Joe Rogan on or else. Content ultimatums, whether they come from artists, interest groups, or the PMRC, quickly become unmanageable. 

My point here is not that Rogan’s views are OK -- they’re not, they’re terrible and dangerous. But it isn’t clear why Rogan’s are suddenly any worse than they have been. Or why Rogan’s content is somehow objectionable and all the other garbage on Spotify and other platforms isn’t. Or why we are racing to punish Spotify for giving the people what they want, and not punishing Rogan for making it, or the people for wanting it. 

OK, fine. What about payments? Some of my musician friends used these events to revive complaints about Spotify’s payouts. Well, many of these complaints are also the same whether you're talking about Spotify or Apple or whoever. Spotify might be the biggest, but it is not like Apple or Amazon or Napster or any of the other services are operating in a substantially different way. They're all the same. I should know -- I helped build the industry. 

Market research and consumer behavior continually shows that it is difficult to get users to pay anything for music, much less $10 per month.

And yet people will pay $10 per month for Netflix AND HBO Max AND Hulu and Disney+, and each of those only have a fraction of cinematic content. Spotify and services like it have, more or less, all of the music in the world. You only need to subscribe to one to get everything, and listeners still won’t do it.

Let’s also not forget that life before the digital music revolution was also shitty for artists, just shitty in a different way. USA FM Radio pays the performer NOTHING. That still didn’t stop artists and labels from doing everything they could, up to and including repeatedly breaking federal law to bribe people with money, drugs, and sex, to get their songs played on FM radio. 

Records were expensive, hard to get, and went out of print. Music would just disappear, lost forever, simply because there were no more copies to be had. Subscription services made that all a thing of the past. And while YouTube might be full of copyright violations, but it is also the only place you are likely to find some rare 12” mixes. 

If you want to distribute your music worldwide, services like Spotify give you a way to do it, and expose your music to a centralized, global audience quickly and inexpensively. It is astounding.

Subscription services may have problems, but Bandcamp is hardly the answer. When Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails can barely get people to pay $5 or $10 for new music they are releasing, what hope is there for Sid Luscious and The Pants or Lizzo or Bad Bunny? The average person doesn’t know how to get photos off of their phone. Do you really think they know how to get music downloads onto it?

There have been plenty of unintended consequences of the shift to subscription music. These services were designed to help level the playing field for smaller artists and amateurs. But removing barriers to entry meant a flood of bad content, mostly from smaller artists and amateurs. 

When you have 10x the amount of music on a service, you also have 10x the amount of bad music on a service, too. That flood of content baffles and confuses listeners, and drives them ever further into the arms of the biggest and most familiar artists. You end up with a world where the biggest take everything, and everyone else is a nobody.

I find armchair criticism of the digital music business model tiresome, particularly when no realistic alternatives are being offered or suggested. People pretend we can just go back to the music business of 1999, without any acknowledgement of how miserable, unfair, and consumer-hostile that was. These are all reasons I left the business almost 7 years ago.

The impulse to limit what content or media people can consume has been around for a long time, frequently driven by concerns about the negative influence of the content and/or media on young people. If you can think of a medium, it has likely been accused of corrupting youth: The internet. Video games. Television. Role-playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons". Movies (usually the kind with sex, but occasionally the kind with violence). Radio. Rock music/hip-hop/jazz. Comic books. Novels (I am not kidding). Probably Greek drama and cave paintings.

On the one hand, a whole bunch of research has shown entertainment media consumption has, at most, minimal effect on people's behaviors (and there's a lot of uncertainty about whether consuming violent media makes people more violent, or if people with high tendencies towards violence prefer more violent media).

But we also know "you are what you eat", and speak frequently about how media "changed our lives". It is sometimes intended as a joke, sometimes as hyperbole. But still.

Does consumption of media, of art, have no effect at all on us? If it does have no effect, well, sorry, artists. You've been wasting your time. But if it does have an effect, even small and/or temporary, the implications seem obvious.

It would mean the entire production chain -- artists, businesspeople, distributors, etc. -- have a responsibility to think about what they are putting out there, wrap it in warnings, and make sure it is only consumed by those of appropriate age.

It would also mean that we, as individuals and media consumers, have a responsibility to think about what we put in our heads.