The IT Nerd

I admit that this sounds like what Neil Young said right before he pulled his music from Spotify. But I believe that with the revelations over the weekend of Joe Rogan being overtly racist on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, I think Spotify is reaching a point where they are having a rubicon moment. Because having a guy who spreads COVID mis-information is bad enough. But add racism to the mix and I believe that Spotify is in a whole world of hurt as that’s another rallying point for those on the #DeleteSpotify side of the fence.

And I think that Spotify knows this because Newsweek is reporting that Daniel Ek has addressed the racism charges via an internal memo to staff:

In a letter sent to staff, Ek addressed Rogan’s use of racial slurs and derogatory comments about Black people and confirmed the removal of certain episodes.

“Not only are some of Joe Rogan’s comments incredibly hurtful—I want to make clear that they do not represent the values of this company,” Ek wrote in the memo obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

“I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated and unheard.”

Ek goes on to say that the company has spoken with Rogan about “some of the content in his show, including his history of using some racially insensitive language.”

Following these chats “and his own reflections,” Ek said that Rogan “chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify.”

Despite “strongly condemning” Rogan’s comments, Ek said he does “not believe that silencing Joe is the answer” and that “canceling voices is a slippery slope.”

So if that’s going on inside his company, you have to imagine what’s going on outside. While Twitter isn’t the gold standard of exactly figuring out what public sentiment is, it does give one a sense of what people think. Here’s a few examples that I found:

That last Tweet is telling because the narrative is starting to become that Spotify supports what Joe Rogan does. Even if that includes racism. If you’re in Spotify’s PR department, that’s got to send shivers down your spine. And again, I think that Spotify knows this. Here’s why I say that via the same Newsweek article that I linked to above:

Ek then pledged $100 million—the same reported figure paid for the exclusive Rogan deal—to licensing, developing, and marketing music and other audio content by creators from historically marginalized groups.

It seems to me that this is an attempt by Ek to distance the company from Rogan. But I am not sure that will be enough. With these latest racism charges, it’s way too late for that if you’re Spotify to distance yourself. And I think you now need to make a choice if you’re Spotify. Do you choose your subscribers, or do you choose Joe Rogan? Because as their troubles with the former mount, it’s becoming clear that Spotify cannot have both and they need to make a choice.

Choose Wisely Spotify.

I am guessing that Spotify must be feeling the heat because word has filtered out from a couple of sources that dozen’s of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience have seemingly disappeared in the last 24 hours. The Huffington Post says over seventy episodes have disappeared:

Some 113 episodes of Rogan’s show have now been removed from Spotify, which is the podcast’s exclusive host, according to data from a website that tracks deleted episodes. (It’s unclear when the approximately 40 other episodes were removed.) That’s just a fraction of the show’s total number of episodes, which stands at around 1,700.

The guests on the episodes taken down on Friday include multiple comedians (like Iliza Shlesinger and Tom Segura), fellow celebrity podcaster Marc Maron, and Vice Media CEO Shane Smith. The previously removed episodes include interviews with far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and white nationalist Stefan Molyneux.

Spotify has been mum on the move, which comes after the company’s leaders spent days supporting the podcast host against an onslaught of criticism from angry artists and subscribers.

While this could be an optics exercise to say “see, we’re doing something”, I am going to guess that this might have something to do with it:

Among Spotify users, 19% said they have already canceled their service — or plan to — over the Rogan uproar, according to a Feb. 1 consumer poll conducted by Forrester Research.

The study also found that 54% of those who use Spotify have no intention of canceling their subscription, while 18.5% said they would considering canceling only if more artists who they like pull their music from the platform. About 8.5% said they thought about canceling their subscription but that Spotify’s features were too important to them.

So if we accept that 19% of people polled have already cancelled their Spotify subscription, that’s not insignificant. Though I will point out that polls should always be treated with a bit of suspicion. So you have to take this with a grain of salt until Spotify’s Q1 numbers come out in a couple of months which will tell the true story. Though if that is even half way accurate, Spotify clearly has a problem. But I would say that this is a bigger problem for Spotify:

Joe Rogan apologized Saturday for the many previous instances in which the host used the n-word on his Spotify podcast.

Rogan, already under fire in recent weeks after medical professionals and musicians decried him for helping spread misinformation on the coronavirus, posted a video on Instagram to address what he described as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.”

Rogan made the apology in response to a compilation video shared widely on social media this past week showing various moments over 12 years in which Rogan said the n-word on his show. The video was posted by singer India.Arie, who recently removed her catalogue from Spotify in response to Rogan’s “language around race.”

While Rogan argued that the clips were taken out of context, the comedian acknowledged that the video looked “horrible, even to me.” In a caption accompanying the video, Rogan wrote that there was “a lot of s— from the old episodes of the podcast that I wish I hadn’t said, or had said differently.”

And:

Listeners also noted that about 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” were taken off Spotify.

Among the purged content is a 2018 appearance by Gad Saad, a marketing professor who studies behavioral sciences at Concordia University at Montreal. On Twitter, Saad said that, “if memory serves me right,” Rogan had used the n-word, “but it was not in a racist manner notwithstanding the likely minefield.”

Saad said that he did not remember the conversation in full, but that he recalled telling Rogan about a university dean getting fired after recommending a book with the n-word in the title — one, Saad said, that had been written by a Black civil rights activist.

“If you’re using the n-word to describe a title, as told to you by a guest on your show, then maybe Spotify should have the most minimal of functioning brain and say, ‘That doesn’t seem to violate anything,’ ” Saad said in a video. “Actually, in my view, it insults the dignity of Black people to say that they must be so emotionally fragile, that the mention of that word, literally in any context is simply unacceptable.”

Neither Rogan nor Spotify have given a reason for the episodes being pulled.

Now that we’ve gone from COVID mis-information to racism, Spotify really has a big problem on its hands. And simply deleting episodes and acting like the problem doesn’t exist won’t solve that.

In a stunning admission, the CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek had this to say in a Spotify town hall as reported by The Verge:

“A publisher has editorial control over a creator’s content — they can take action on the content before it’s even published,” he says, like editing episodes, removing guests, or preventing one from publishing at all. Ek noted that Spotify does have editorial control over the properties it owns outright, like The Ringer and Gimlet, but emphasized the distinction between those studios and Rogan. “Even though JRE is an exclusive, it is licensed content. It is important to note that we do not have creative control over Joe Rogan’s content. We don’t approve his guests in advance, and just like any other creator, we get his content when he publishes, and then we review it, and if it violates our policies, we take the appropriate enforcement actions.”

Notably, Ek did not defend Rogan’s views. “There are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive,” he said.

He adds that there are a “number” of JRE episodes Spotify has removed because they violate the platform’s rules. (It’s unclear what episodes Ek is referencing, but fans noticed some missing when Rogan made the move to the platform in September 2020, and Rogan acknowledged their removal last March.) 

So this ties into an article that I wrote a few days ago. But the thing that I find interesting is that even the CEO of Spotify has problems with Rogan. Yet the service that he runs still hosts his content. Thus showing that this is all about the Benjamins for him. Or put another way, Spotify paid Rogan something around $100 million in hopes that he would help Spotify turn a profit on a consistent basis. So Ek is going to ride that horse as long as he can do so because he really has no plan B. I also find it interesting that when Rogan made the move to Spotify, some of his episodes disappeared. Thus it’s clear that Spotify knew what they were getting when they signed Rogan. And this is clearly unsettling to Spotify employees:

For some employees, though, Ek and the team’s sentiments rang hollow. Throughout the town hall, they messaged internally, according to screenshots viewed by The Verge, expressing disappointment with the choice Spotify made in not only signing Rogan but also in defending him. They questioned how the company considers itself a platform while still actively promoting JRE and including its logo on the cover art and how what some consider an ethical issue is being put in pure business terms.

I take that to mean that Ek’s problems are multifaceted. As in he has to deal with external forces as well as his own employees protesting about Joe Rogan. That’s not a good place to be if you’re Ek. And it’s also a sure sign that you might be on the wrong side of this, and that you should be reconsidering your choices when it comes to this.