Neil Young deletes open letter calling for Joe Rogan censorship on Spotify | Hacker News Reader

Neil Young deletes open letter calling for Joe Rogan censorship on Spotify

reclaimthenet.org

5 pointsfinite_jest7 comments

It's ironic that the same people crying about the death of the free market are now crying about "censorship" and "cancel culture" in cases (like this one) where it is clearly just the free market.

If Neil Young's contracts allow him, he is free to choose to stop using Spotify. That's all he said in his letter: Spotify can't have both his music and Rogan's podcast.

Calling this "censorship" is authoritarian.

That's not really a fruitful line of argument. The natural continuation is that, of course, we are also free to criticize someone for trying to shut others up.

Censorship has many forms, and is not exclusive to the government. Corporate censorship [1] in response to social pressure seems to be the dominant one in our era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

The solution to corporate censorship is not to take away corporate speech. It is to enable competition against corporations that are too powerful.

For example, Spotify doesn't have startup competitors because it's so difficult to get legal rights to streaming. The government could require that music owners of significant size publish prices for streaming rights and apply those prices equally to any streaming service.

Sure, that's one solution and an interesting suggestion. In this particular case, however, we can also cheer for Spotify and JRE.

I think Spotify is doing the right thing in this particular case (though probably not because of some principled commitment to free expression, but merely for the sake of the bottom-line).

I don't by this "censorship" rap. That's not what's happening here.

Neil is just saying: "If you're going to do <X> (which just so happens to be patently obnoxious and harmful) -- I don't want to be associated with it. So I'm going to find another party."

Which he has a perfect right to do -- full stop.

:-) Yet again, I'm not sure why having rights should stop there, we also have a right to criticize him for what we might think is paternalistic or censorious behaviour.

You do have that right but to exercise it seems oddly ... paternalistic.

":-)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com