Spotify is still losing artists, despite efforts over the weekend to assure audiences that the streamer would add content advisories to its podcasts.
On Tuesday, Graham Nash said he would be following the lead of his former bandmate Neil Young in removing his solo work from Spotify over the “COVID disinformation spread by Joe Rogan on Spotify.”
“There is a difference between being open to varying viewpoints on a matter and knowingly spreading false information which some 270 medical professionals have derided as not only false but dangerous,” Nash said in a statement. “Likewise, there is a difference between misinformation, in which one is unaware that what is being said is false, versus disinformation which is knowingly false and intended to mislead and sway public opinion. The opinions publicized by Rogan are so dishonest and unsupported by solid facts that Spotify becomes an enabler in a way that costs people their lives.”
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Former bandmate David Crosby, meanwhile, has been promoting tweets sympathetic to Neil Young’s cause and tweeted that “Crosby would too if he still controlled his music.” When asked by a Twitter user about his own catalog, he wrote that its corporate owner “would not cut revenue to please me …..not a chance.”
Nash’s decision to leave also came a few hours after India Arie, the Grammy Award–winning artist and host of the podcast SongVersation, said she would pull her music and podcast due to Rogan’s recent comments about Black people on his podcast, in which he said it was “weird” to describe Black people as “black” unless they were “100 percent African, from the darkest place, where they’re not wearing any clothes all day.”
The musician also called out Spotify’s compensation for artists in context of the $100 million deal the company paid for Rogan to bring his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience exclusively to Spotify.
“Neil Young opened a door that I MUST walk through,” Arie wrote in a post on Instagram. “What I am talking about is RESPECT — who gets it and who doesn’t. … This shows the type of company they are and the company that they keep. I’m tired.”
