rock
Neil Young will release a new live album in April, which can also be heard on Spotify. — © getty
Two years ago, Neil Young withdrew his music from Spotify because he did not want to be on the same streaming service as controversial podcaster Joe Rogan. Now that Rogan is on every streaming service, the Canadian rocker is lifting his boycott.
Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the free world’ will soon be available again on Spotify. The Canadian folk rocker has announced that he will return his songs to the music streaming service after a two-year absence.
Two years ago, Young published an open letter in which he announced that he was withdrawing his catalog from Spotify. He did this in protest against the disinformation that, according to him, the controversial American podcaster Joe Rogan spread on the streaming service. In his podcast The Joe Rogan experience, Rogan invited guests who without much resistance questioned the usefulness of corona vaccines and spout conspiracy theories. So Young gave Spotify an ultimatum: “They can have Rogan, or Young. Not both,” he said. So it became Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world at the time, and not a folk musician in his seventies.
Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, among others, followed Young’s example and removed their catalog in protest. Crosby, Stills and Nash reversed their boycott after five months, partly because both Spotify and Rogan had apologized and promised to keep out disinformation. Mitchell is still not available on Spotify.
Lost $16,000 a month
At the time he announced his boycott, Young was getting about 6 million listeners a month on Spotify. The price of that principled attitude? About 16,000 dollars or more than 14,000 euros in missed royalties every month, Billboard calculated.
But now that Joe Rogan can be heard everywhere, Young’s lonely resistance has become useless. Rogan, who is no longer exclusively associated with Spotify, also signed contracts with YouTube, Apple Music and Amazon in February. “I can’t just leave Apple and Amazon like I did with Spotify,” Young explains on his website. “My music would then be very rarely available to stream for music lovers, so I returned to Spotify.”
That return is not really a wholehearted one. The Canadian sees Spotify as a necessary evil. Between 2015 and 2019 he removed his songs from the streaming service because he thought the sound quality was too low. Even now that he is returning, he takes a swipe at Spotify: on his website he calls it “the world’s number 1 streaming service for music in low playback quality”.
Young will release a new live album at the end of April. So that will be another grinding of teeth for the septuagenarian when he releases the songs on Spotify (and elsewhere).
2024-03-14 17:35:48
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