Neil Young’s music will return to Spotify, after the controversy involving Joe Rogan | Music

Neil Young’s music is about to return to Spotify. The artist had demanded that his publisher, Warner Music, remove his catalog from the music platform. streaming in early 2022, due to Spotify maintaining the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experiencea space where, during the pandemic, host Joe Rogan advised healthy young people not to get vaccinated and spread misinformation about Covid-19, for example by advocating the treatment of an infection with ivermectin (the use of this antiparasitic medicine was expressly advised against by the European Medicines Agency).

Until February, The Joe Rogan Experience it was exclusive content from Spotify (Rogan always shared excerpts from different episodes on YouTube, in which he invited guests to talk about different topics, but never the entire episodes). This changed with the recent negotiation of a new contract, which is estimated to be worth around 250 million dollars (almost 229 million euros) and which allows the podcast is also available on other platforms, from YouTube to Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, for example.

​This puts Neil Young in a difficult position. “I can’t just leave Apple and Amazon,” he wrote this Tuesday in his blog post. sitestating that, if he made that decision, his music would almost disappear from the streaming. How the podcast by Joe Rogan is no longer confined to Spotify, Neil Young’s boycott no longer makes sense, so the artist will reintroduce his work on the platform — which at one time, and according to him, represented 60% of consumption on streaming of your music.

The author of landmark folk albums such as After the Gold Rush (1970) or Harvest (1972), to name just a couple of them, accused Spotify of “selling lies in exchange for money” when, two years ago, it forced the Swedish company to make a choice: either it stopped hosting The Joe Rogan Experience, or else I would no longer be able to count on Neil Young’s music. The confrontation had a quick resolution, with Spotify opting for the much listened to podcast. In solidarity with Neil Young and similarly outraged by the spread of “lies that threaten people’s lives”, Joni Mitchell, another giant name in folk and Canadian music, also removed her music from Spotify.

The effects were felt by Spotify in a very short time. In three days, it was then reported, the company lost around 2.1 billion dollars (around 1.9 billion euros). Similarly, its shares fell 6%.

Joe Rogan would, however, apologize for his dissemination of false information about the pandemic. “I don’t always get it right,” he said, adding that from now on, he would try to “balance things” by seeking out “experts with different opinions” among themselves. Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, followed the same path. “We have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to information that is widely accepted by the medical and scientific communities,” he reflected.

It was with acidity and a “prick” that Young announced his return to the platform. “Spotify, where you get less quality than what we did, will host my music again,” he wrote, criticizing its sound quality standards.