Neil Young to Spotify: Since You Won't Dump Joe Rogan, I'm Dumping You

Neil Young’s rock and roll is here to stay, but not on Spotify. The Canadian singer-songwriter announced Wednesday he’s pulling his music from the streaming service in protest of its continued toleration of phony pandemic advice from star podcaster Joe Rogan.

Calling Spotify “a very damaging force via its public misinformation and lies about COVID,”  Young wrote in a letter posted to his site that he was having his catalog removed from Spotify even if it meant taking a wrecking ball to his own income.

“Spotify represents 60% of the streaming of my music to listeners around the world, almost every record I have ever released is available—my life’s music—a huge loss for my record company to absorb,” Young wrote.

Young didn’t call out Rogan by name in his post, but did so in a separate letter published Monday and since deleted, Rolling Stone reports. 

Wednesday’s post from Young—who nearly died from polio in 1951 at age 5, years before vaccines for that disease became available—cited an open letter posted by 270 medical experts demanding that Spotify implement a medical misinformation policy. 

The doctors, nurses, and researchers objected to Rogan’s history of either voicing or hosting nonsense about the pandemic on the Joe Rogan Experience. That includes advocating discredited treatments like ivermectin and questioning the effectiveness of messenger-RNA vaccines (with more than 500 million mRNA doses in the US alone, the evidence is overwhelming that they work to prevent serious infections, hospitalizations, and deaths).

Rogan himself contracted COVID-19 last year and survived, unlike more than 5.6 million people and counting. 

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On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed Spotify spokesman as saying the service feels “great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators” and noting that Spotify has yanked 20,000-plus Covid-specific podcast episodes. 

The Stockholm-based company signed Rogan in 2020 to an exclusive contract that the Journal reported was worth north of $100 million. At the end of 2021, Spotify reported that the Joe Rogan Experience was its most popular podcast worldwide. 

Rock and country fans may not notice Young’s absence in an enormous Spotify catalogue that runs from Hank Williams to Jimi Hendrix and beyond. But those with a hankering to stream Young’s work in particular can still find it on Spotify rivals like Amazon Music Unlimited and Apple Music, where, as Young notes in his letter, it’s available in a higher-fidelity format that Spotify has yet to support.