Roxane Gay, the host of The Roxane Gay Agenda podcast, has removed her show from Spotify amid a growing number of high-profile departures from the streaming platform.
As of Wednesday, the podcast — which premiered in late January — is not available on Spotify but can still be streamed on Apple Podcasts or the Luminary app. “It won’t move any sort of needle but I removed my podcast from Spotify,” the Bad Feminist author tweeted. “That’s all there really is to say about that. Onward.”
Gay’s departure comes after India Arie, a musician and podcaster said she would be pulling her podcast SongVersation from Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan’s comments on his podcast that it would be “weird” to call Black people “black” unless they were “100 percent African, from the darkest place, where they’re not wearing any clothes all day.”
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As for other podcasters, Brené Brown, who has two exclusive podcasts with Spotify, announced last week that she would be pausing the release of any future episodes of Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead. In a message posted to her personal website, Brown elaborated on her decision and called on Spotify to “have a transparent misinformation policy (made available to the public) that balances addressing the complex misinformation issues we face today while respecting free speech” that was applied across the platform.
Also on Wednesday, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash issued a joint statement in solidarity with their former bandmate Neil Young, who was the first to pull his music from Spotify in protest, and said they had requested that their labels remove their solo and collaborative music from the platform.
“We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences,” Crosby, Stills and Nash said. “Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music — or the music we made together — to be on the same platform.”
