Spotify has been engulfed in controversy since rocker Neil Young forced one of the country’s largest streaming services to choose between him and its popular podcast host, Joe Rogan.
Over the past week, Young’s protest has prompted other major artists to break up with the company and some Spotify employees have expressed concerns about its relationship with Rogan. Musicians long frustrated with how little Spotify pays to play their songs are hoping the backlash will force bigger changes.
Spotify has announced new misinformation policies, but so far that hasn’t dampened criticism of the company.
Here’s everything you need to know.
Why is everyone leaving?
Joe Rogan had long courted controversy and prided himself on hosting guests on his podcast that challenge mainstream views. Before moving his show — which reaches an estimated 11 million listeners per episode — to Spotify in 2020, he interviewed the founder of far-right group the Proud Boys, and an author who said young people transitioning their gender could create “contagion” that would infect their peers.
As the pandemic raged, Rogan has attracted even more protests after inviting on guests who questioned the value of masks, vaccines and pandemic restrictions such as lockdowns. Rogan, who contracted the coronavirus himself, has endorsed the use of ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that experts say does not help fight covid-19, and suggested that young people do not need to get vaccinated.
On Dec. 31, Rogan uploaded an episode with Robert Malone, a scientist and prominent anti-vaccine influencer. Years ago, Malone worked on early research into the mRNA technology that Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are based on but has since spoken out against vaccines, saying people who’ve had covid already shouldn’t get vaccinated.
The show prompted a group of nearly 300 scientists and doctors to write to Spotify asking them to step in to keep medical misinformation off their platform. Young says he saw that letter and decided to write his own.
“I realized I could not continue to support Spotify’s life threatening misinformation to the music loving public,” Young said in a Jan. 26 statement on his website. Spotify represents 60 percent of the total streams of his music, but he wanted to leave anyway, despite the financial impact on him and his record label, Young said.
Which artists have left Spotify?
Soon after Young left the platform, Joni Mitchell became the first major artist to join him. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue,” she said in a statement.
Nils Lofgren, a guitarist in Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band, followed soon thereafter, writing on his website, “When these heroic women and men, who’ve spent their lives healing and saving ours, cry out for help you don’t turn your back on them for money and power. You listen and stand with them.”
India.Arie then announced on Instagram that she decided to pull both her music and her podcast, SongVersation, from the service. “Neil Young opened a door that I MUST walk through,” she wrote, adding that her reasons were slightly different from Young’s. The singer said she found Rogan “problematic” for his “language around race.” She also noted that the company pays artists “a fraction of the penny,” while purchasing his podcast for a reported $100 million.
On Wednesday, Young’s former bandmates, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, said they would join him in abandoning Spotify, citing ethical concerns. “Knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences,” they said in a Twitter post.
Podcasters have also joined in. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston who hosts the “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead” podcasts on Spotify, tweeted that she “will not be releasing any podcasts until further notice.” She has since added that she may return to the platform, depending on how it enforces its new policies.
Social commentator and writer Roxane Gay said she removed her podcast, “The Roxane Gay Agenda,” in a brief tweet: “It won’t move any sort of needle but I removed my podcast from Spotify. That’s all there really is to say about that. Onward.” Mary L. Trump, former president Donald Trump’s niece who wrote the tell-all “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” announced she was also removing her podcast, saying, “I know it’s not a big deal but hope it will be part of a growing avalanche.”
Others, including Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have a deal to host and produce Spotify podcasts, expressed “concerns” in a statement released Sunday.
The White House even spoke out. Press secretary Jen Psaki called Spotify’s decision to add disclaimers to podcasts that discuss covid-19 a “positive step.”
“Our hope is that all major tech platforms and all major news sources, for that matter, be responsible and be vigilant to ensure the American people have access to accurate information on something as significant as covid-19,” Psaki said Tuesday. “That certainly includes Spotify.”
Why would Spotify choose Rogan over Young?
It all comes down to money.
Spotify has been clear about its intentions to own the podcasting space, and Rogan is one of its biggest stars. Each episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” attracts around 11 million listeners. He posts four to five episodes each week, and they generally run past the three-hour mark. That’s more than 15 hours of engagement each week from a single show.
Young, meanwhile, attracted a bit more than 6 million listeners each month — and a “listener” can be counted as someone who listened to “Heart of Gold” or “Cortez the Killer” a single time. Plus, Young’s music can be heard on other platforms, such as Amazon Music, Apple Music or Tidal. Rogan is exclusive to Spotify (to the tune, again, of $100 million).
You need Spotify to listen to Rogan. You can hear Young just about anywhere.
Is leaving Spotify difficult?
Because of complicated copyright issues, not everyone can just pull their music from Spotify. David Crosby, for example, tweeted that he couldn’t remove his music because, “I no longer control it or I would in support of Neil.”
The issue comes down to the fact that for most songs, there are two distinct copyrights. There’s the song composition (the arrangement of the music and the lyrics), and there’s the tangible sound recording of the music (known as the “master”).
In most traditional pre-streaming recording contracts, record labels would own the sound recording, while musicians would retain the publishing rights. The split means many artists don’t have full control over their music. Furthermore, in recent years, some major artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Paul Simon and more have sold both sets of rights to outside parties, meaning they have no control over how their tunes are used.
Some artists have resorted to more guerrilla methods of protest. Belly and Eve 6 changed their Spotify banners to read “DELETE SPOTIFY” in protest. “It’s the smallest gesture we could make, but when you don’t have a lot of tools in your toolbox to conquer the giant, you’re going to do what you can,” Belly bassist Gail Greenwood said.
Is this about more than Joe Rogan?
For many artists, the long-simmering tensions with Spotify have more to do with money than any podcast.
“People are finally blasting an interrogation lamp on Spotify,” Eve 6 frontman Max Collins told The Washington Post. “It’s my hope that whatever side of the culture war, the Rogan-Neil Young thing, a person may land, that people can be sympathetic to the struggle of working artists trying to get fair pay.”
Many musicians argue that Spotify doesn’t fairly compensate them. As The Post reported, “For each dollar of revenue Spotify earns, 58.5 cents goes to the owner of a song’s sound recording (usually a record label), Spotify keeps 29.38 cents, 6.12 cents goes to whoever owns publishing rights (usually the songwriter) and 6 cents goes to mechanical rights (often, but not always, owned by the songwriter), according to Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a financial consulting firm.
Artists are paid between $0.0033 and $0.0054 every time their song is played, according to Business Insider. By another metric, according to data that the rapper T-Pain tweeted in December, it takes the average artist roughly 315 streams of a song to earn $1 from Spotify. “Every other service pays better rates than Spotify. Napster pays the highest rates, believe it or not,” Kay Hanley, the frontwoman of the rock band Letters to Cleo and co-executive director of Songwriters of North America, said. There, for comparison, a song has to be played only 53 times before the artist earns a dollar.
Wait, isn’t Spotify a music company?
The key to this story is that, despite public perception, Spotify is not a music company. It’s a tech company seeking to maximize profits, and it hasn’t been shy about its desire to dominate the podcast space.
In 2019, Spotify announced it was planning to spend up to $500 million to acquire companies “in the emerging podcast marketplace.” That same year, it followed through on the promise, purchasing Gimlet Media, home of podcasts such as “Reply All,” “Homecoming” and “Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel,” for an estimated $230 million. It also spent more than $100 million on Anchor, a platform that lets users create and share their own podcasts.
The next year, Spotify spent nearly $200 million to acquire the Ringer and its suite of popular sports and pop culture podcasts, which include “Binge Mode” and “The Rewatchables.” The spending spree culminated in the reportedly $100 million purchase for exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
“I think it comes down to, just frankly, business,” John Simson, program director for the business and entertainment program at American University, told The Post. According to Spotify, 70 percent of the revenue it takes in from music goes to various rights holders. “They’re looking for other places where the revenue split isn’t that dramatic,” Simson added. “Podcasts were certainly their go-to.”
The gambit has paid off for Spotify, which reportedly overtook Apple Podcasts last year to become the largest podcast provider in the United States.
So what’s Spotify doing now?
The company has been in damage-control mode for a week, and on Sunday it announced it would add special warnings and links to reputable information to podcast episodes dealing with the pandemic. That’s the same playbook Facebook and YouTube have used when faced with their own creators promoting misinformation or ideas about the pandemic that contradict scientific consensus.
“It’s too early to know what the impact may be, and usually when we have controversies in the past those are measured in months and not days,” CEO Daniel Ek said during the company’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday. “We’re trying to balance creative expression with the safety of users and of course this is a very complicated issue.”
Inside the company, some employees have used internal messaging channels to try to draw attention to their concerns about Spotify’s relationship with Rogan, according to company documents and screenshots of the conversations reviewed by The Post.
How can you leave Spotify without losing all your saved songs and playlists?
For those who want to follow Neil Young and quit Spotify, there are a handful of other music streaming platforms. The biggest are all run by tech giants including Apple, Amazon and Google, but there are also smaller alternatives including Tidal and Deezer. There are also services that let you import your playlists and song library to the new service from Spotify, though some of them charge money if you want to move a lot of songs over at once.
