Spotify Sides with Joe Rogan, Begins Removing Neil Young's Music from Service

"We regret Neil's decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon," said the company

BY Alex HudsonPublished Jan 26, 2022

This week, Neil Young condemned Spotify for hosting podcaster Joe Rogan on its platform and said, "They can have Rogan or Young. Not both." Now Spotify has made its choice, and it's picking Rogan.

In a statement, Spotify said:

We want all the world's music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. 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. We regret Neil's decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.

Young's music is already in the process of being removed from Spotify, although it's mostly still up as of this writing. The artist has since had his SiriusXM radio station re-launched

In a since-deleted open letter published on his website, Young said the Spotify was "spreading false information about vaccines" by hosting Rogan's podcast, and "potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by [him]."

Spotify signed a $100 million deal with Rogan in 2020. Since then, he's hosted a variety of anti-vax guests on his show The Joe Rogan Experience.

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