The IT Nerd

Spotify is feeling the heat from the actions of their star podcaster Joe Rogan. With a pair of artists leaving and others questioning the company and calling for more artists to leave, you know that things are not good for the Swedish company. They did sort of respond to that yesterday with a very lame response, but one person who has not responded to this is Joe Rogan himself.

Until now that is.

Rogan has now posted an almost 10-minute-long video to Instagram in which he claims that the criticisms are taken out of context, and defends the credentials of his recent guests. The ones who have been accused of spreading COVID mis-information. However he does go on to apologize to Spotify for the controversy he has caused and promises to “balance” out his guests in the future.

Here’s a link to his Instagram post:

Keep in mind that in December, around 270 doctors, researchers, and other health care professionals in a wide range of fields signed an open letter calling on Spotify to introduce measures to address misinformation about the virus on its platform. The letter’s authors specifically took aim at an interview Rogan aired with a doctor, Robert Malone, who said Americans had been “hypnotized” into wearing masks and getting vaccinated. But according to Rogan, “I wanted to hear what their opinion is,” and “I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them.”

I’m sorry. I’m not buying what he’s selling. But we will see how much of an effect it has on the growing firestorm around Spotify. If it has any effect at all.

After having Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pull their catalogs from Spotify, and having customers cancel their subscriptions in protest, Spotify clearly is feeling the heat. Prince Harry and Meghan have waded into this mess in a big way. The pair signed a deal with Spotify in 2020 to produce content under their brand Archewell Audio for an undisclosed sum. But the world on the street says that it is worth tens of millions of dollars. But apparently that could be going out the window as journalist Omid Scobie, the author of Finding Freedom, a much-contested biography of the couple served this up on Twitter:

I am going to go out on a limb here and say Spotify needs them a hell of a lot more than Prince Harry and Meghan need Spotify. I guess that’s why Spotify took this action.

But that’s not all. Another musician are boycotting Spotify.

Rock musician Nils Lofgren on Saturday became the latest artist to join a protest kicked off by his bandmate Young, saying in a statement that he, too, would “cut ties with Spotify” and urged “all musicians, artists and music lovers everywhere” to do the same. Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also said she plans to remove her music from Spotify in solidarity with Young “and the global scientific and medical communities.”

Nils Lofgren is a guitarist best known as a member of Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Making this a non-trivial event for Spotify. And if other artists join him as well as Young and Mitchell, Spotify could be in trouble. And I am guess that they are aware of this and are taking action. But rather than dumping Joe Rogan who has been the source of COVID vaccine mis-information, they put out this press release which is attributed to Daniel Ek who is the CEO of Spotify that in part says the following:

• Today we are publishing our long-standing Platform Rules. These policies were developed by our internal team in concert with a number of outside experts and are updated regularly to reflect the changing safety landscape. These are rules of the road to guide all of our creators—from those we work with exclusively to those whose work is shared across multiple platforms. You can now find them on our newsroom, and they’ll live permanently on the main Spotify website. They are being localized into various languages to help our users understand how Spotify assesses all content on our platform.
• We are working to add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. This advisory will direct listeners to our dedicated COVID-19 Hub, a resource that provides easy access to data-driven facts, up-to-date information as shared by scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities around the world, as well as links to trusted sources. This new effort to combat misinformation will roll out to countries around the world in the coming days. To our knowledge, this content advisory is the first of its kind by a major podcast platform. 
• We will also begin testing ways to highlight our Platform Rules in our creator and publisher tools to raise awareness around what’s acceptable and help creators understand their accountability for the content they post on our platform. This is in addition to the terms that creators and publishers agree to governing their use of our services.

Three words come to mind when I read this:

Not. Good. Enough.

But they had to do something as the bad press, the loss of customers, an increasing musician boycott, and according to Variety, Spotify’s market cap falling more than $2 billion last week was likely hurting the company. At this point it should be clear that Spotify values Joe Rogan and the COVID mis-information that he communicates via his platform. Which means that musicians and the general public have to make a decision as to whether they are okay with Spotify being a source of COVID mis-information.

Last night news filtered out that Neil Young who had been demanding that either Spotify remove his catalog of music from the platform, or remove Joe Rogan from the platform because Young would not be on a platform with an anti-vaxxer like Rogan came to a head. In short, Spotify removed Young’s music. Effectively siding with Joe Rogan.

This triggered a backlash against Spotify. Here’s some examples on Twitter:

Of course there are those on the other side of the argument as well:

Frankly, I’m not surprised that things went down like this. Spotify paid something in the neighbourhood of $100 million USD for the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. So the chances that Spotify was going dump this podcast were between slim and none with slim packing their bags to leave town.

Now I spent a lot of time trolling Twitter last night and this morning, and I found way more Tweets against this move to remove Young’s music rather than for it. In other words, a lot more people on Twitter appear to support Neil Young. And they also appear to be against vaccine mis-information. Now is that due to the fact that these people are more vocal on Twitter? Maybe. Twitter while being a good source to get a pulse about what people think about a situation is hardly the definitive source of what people think. But I really think that Spotify has this wrong and they’ve picked the wrong side of this argument. Starting with this comment which was part of their statement when they pulled Neil Young’s catalog yesterday:

“We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.

So they’ve removed podcasts related to COVID? I have to assume that they mean podcasts that have mis-information related to COVID because it isn’t clear from that sentence. But interestingly, they didn’t remove Joe Rogan’s podcast which is known to have COVID mis-information. Likely because they did pay about $100 Million USD for it, along with the listeners who come with it. From a PR perspective, the optics of that statement suck because it suggests that Rogan gets a free pass due to the value that his podcast brings to Spotify. Which doesn’t surprise me. But it does send one clear message to Spotify subscribers. Which is if you don’t like the fact that they’ve sided with Joe Rogan, cancel your subscription. And that appears to be happening based on what I see on Twitter. On what scale that cancellations are happening I don’t know, but I am guessing that we’ll find out the next time that Spotify reports their numbers.

The thing is that this situation is causing people to dump Spotify and try Tidal, Apple Music, and other streaming services. And they may not come back to Spotify if they like the service that they switched to. Which of course is great for those other services. But it’s bad for Spotify. What makes it worse for Spotify is that one of those companies that I mentioned above is a three trillion dollar company who buys other companies using the loose change in Tim Cook’s sofa. In other words, if Apple who is a company who isn’t afraid to take a stand decides to take a shot at Spotify, it might not end well for Spotify as Apple has way deeper pockets than Spotify and they may sense that Spotify is vulnerable at the moment. Which means that it’s the perfect time for Apple to try and take the kill shot. And then there’s the possibility that a Taylor Swift or an Adele decides to follow Neil Young’s lead and takes their fan base off of Spotify. Can Spotify afford to take that hit?

At this point Spotify needs to do a rethink of this and find a way to exit this situation gracefully. I say that because this has the potential to become a train wreck for Spotify. If it hasn’t already.

This will be fun to watch.

UPDATE: Well this isn’t going well for Spotify. This has happened since I wrote this article:

In case you haven’t seen or heard of this guy before, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus runs the World Health Organization. And he’s clearly picked a side in this argument. And it’s not Spotify’s side. And he’s not the only doctor to call out Spotify. Earlier this month hundreds of doctors and health care professionals in the U.S wrote an open letter to Spotify about the misinformation being shared on the podcast, according to Rolling Stone.

Spotify is really going to regret being on the wrong side of this. I am calling it now.