Spotify sides with Joe Rogan, removes Neil Young’s music
nypost.com
nypost.com
Did Young really think that Spotify would drop Rogan over him? Would he have preferred to keep the status quo? I believe Young got what he asked for and/or wanted. He's no longer on the same platform as Rogan. That's a win, right?
Maybe, but
> 60% of Young's streaming revenue comes from Spotify meaning the move is likely to cost him and his record label, Warner Bros[1]
So what "little" they paid him was still the majority of what he was making. And I think it will be hard for someone from his genre (1960's/70's) to make a come back. Most people under 35ish-40 have never heard of him and likely won't listen due to the genre.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/01/27/spotify-grants-n...
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/siriusxm-...
This is why you hear Led Zeppelin and Dylan songs in car ads now. With little revenue from recording sales or streaming, artists are leaning more on other revenue like sync licenses and co-marketing deals. If you read carefully, the Sirius deal is not just access to Young’s back catalog, it is using his name to market Sirius. He gets paid for that on top of the music itself.
Do you really think musicians make most of the money they make from streaming? Dude could have 1 concert a year and pull in more than his streaming would in a decade. Not to mention merch, commercial licensing.. etc..
LOL
There, I fixed it. LOL
60% of 1% is 0.6%, I think he'll be okay.
It came off like he was shouting his irrelevancy from the rooftops. I hope he gained some sense of satisfaction or peace from his, because he won't be gaining much else.
I don't think he expected Spotify to cancel Rogan, I do think he expected to raise awareness of Rogan's dangerous and anti-scientific medical nonsense, and he quite succesfully did that, at his own expense.
The embarrassment is with Spotify, who'd have very likely have cancelled Rogan right away had he been a nobody, an insignificant part of their business, spouting anti-scientific nonsense on their platform. Spotify chose the money. I'd probably have doen the same in Spotify's shoes, but they may at least be embarrassed about it, and Niel Young certainly doesn't. It was a matter of principles that you're downplaying to it ostensibly being a matter of it being a popularity contest.
Spotify did exactly the right thing, not giving into to arbitrary censorship is a principled stance. They should be applauded for that (Though lets not pretend there isn't also a financial motive as well)
I certainly thing Neil Young should be embarrassed. My person opinion of him is now very low.
That's not commendable in my book.
This is absolutely Young pulling an authoritarian "You're not allowed to hear things I don't like" move. There's really no other way to spin it. Disagreement with people is great, to then take the next step and say that others should not get access to the things I do not like.... well that's just a step another rung up the authoritarian/fascist ladder. It's a elitist control freak mindset.
It's so opposite of what his music is supposedly about you have wonder whether he's just been a sellout this whole time.
> When I left Spotify, I felt better. I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.
No, he's hoping that other artists will follow suit and that collectively they will choose the artists over Rogan. I don't see it happening, but open to being wrong.
Either way, it's bad for the consumer. It's the people using Spotify themselves, and Joe Rogan for signing with them that made this potential censorship possible by allowing themselves to be walled off.
Neil Young hasn't lost. He's kicked off the anti-free speech war on Podcasts. It's always been coming, the messaging has been clear: the far right operate with impunity and spread hate and disinformation on podcasts, and it's uncensorable. This has to change.
Once the king goes, everyone is fair game. That's why they are after Joe, and it isn't going to stop.
I highly doubt Joe doesn't end up back on an .RSS feed hosted by Gab servers before the end of the 2024 election.
I don't want to speak for Neil Young, but I imagine he knew for certain Spotify would choose Rogan. But there's no such thing as bad press right? He knew he could force them to publicly take a position and now here we are all talking about it. Mission accomplished by Young I'd say.
Young's request was unconditional. "I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform." Probably he would reconsider if they dropped Rogan. Certainly he expected they wouldn't.
He has fuck you money and a history of taking stands. All of us are talking about what he wanted people talking about. Surely he'd like if it started a movement. I think he got everything he expected though.
You can buy any of his music DRM-free directly: https://store.neilyoungarchives.com/
You do not maintain or own cloud storage. You might want to rad the fine print on your cloud storage service and who actually owns that data.
One of the only places in the world left that is mainstream and uncensored is audio podcasting.
Joe Rogan is public enemy #1, not necessarily for his content, but because he represents the largest and last stumbling block to full censorship and control. When Joe falls, the precedent is set, and all the other players in the podcast sphere are wiped out and censored within a matter of weeks and months.
You might say podcasts are uncensorable by nature, but that's just not true. They have been walled off and monetised, and that's a problem. Contractually and for owning your listeners.
And even if someone wants to host a podcast oldschool, RSS style, that's not going to fly. Most hosting services and payment processors feel they have to the right to not host content they don't agree with.
Ultimately Neil Young is just a loser pawn in a bigger game. A useful idiot if you will, because he will never live up to the standard he is advocating for if he lives another decade.
But he gets what he wants: social justice points. I just hope the investors in his catalog sue him for lost profits.
Anyway, make no mistake, this is the opening salvo, not game set match.
Rogan's own words:
“This doctor was saying ivermectin is 99 percent effective intreating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,”
This is objectively false.
But talking about that doesn't seem to be anywhere near the scale of dangerous public menace and should be banned.
You don't find that irresponsible?
Wikipedia has a good rule in Articles for Deletion debates, where they decide which articles to keep when people nominate them for deletion. They're not votes. You can get all your friends to chime in with dumb comments saying "keep" or "delete" for stupid reasons, but the admin who evaluates the AfD debate is supposed to ignore the count of comments supporting any given argument, and just make a note of the diversity of those arguments, and then evaluate which set of arguments are stronger. You can spam an AfD with misinformation, but at least in theory it shouldn't work (in fact, you might be just as likely to piss off the admin and nudge them the other way).
That's a good way to look at HN threads as well. If you have something interesting to say, say it, and then get out of the way; let the dumb comments be the noise, not yours.
This is all very meta, I know, but this whole thread is so pointless that meta can only improve it.
“Rogan literally said "This doctor was saying ivermectin is 99 percent effective intreating Covid" to millions of millions of his listeners.”
was really valuable to me. Because it's so incredibly stupid that if one can string together a bunch of such comments from JR, it can actually persuade some people to not believe him. We have a type of Godman quack around here who spouts nonsense on TV. Some people string together all the outright nonsensy parts and make a single video, while referencing where they came from. Those are really helpful.
Edit: also it's a problem with only some message boards. There are message boards where a comment such as 'raynier made will be outright dismissed. And they are also places where 'thoughtful conversations' happen. Also I don't think it's 'badgering' when you quote something incredibly stupid and dangerous JR said.
Edit2: also there is an order of more people that just read comments than comment. A concrete comment of yours like the one I quoted above can really convince some people. It's a good thing.
I listen to a few podcasts sometimes hosts get things wrong, sometimes really wrong. That's fine.
That sounds like an opinion. One that lacks substance and likely couldn't actually be proven as stated, but an opinion I'm happy you can express openly. I'm also appreciative of other opinions I hear on Joe's show, and others. Can you appreciate that building up a false dichotomy and then asking someone if they can spot the difference is disingenuous?
Yeah, taking ivermectin to treat covid despite doctor's advice is objectively dangerous... people have actually died trying to take horse de-wormer. Rogan still spreads this nonsense.
You're appreciative of Joe having Jordan Peterson on to ramble about things like "climate doesn't exist"? In the same episode Rogan says it's "weird" to call black people black because they're not dark enough to be considered black technically. You feel like you've gained something from this exchange?
Despite some doctor's advice....
Joe's doctor prescribed him human grade ivermectin, not "horse dewormer." HIS doctor. So HIS doctors advice was to take it, along with monoclonal antibodies, along with vitamins, and other things. He listened to HIS doctor, and recovered, and then told people what HE did. So it's Joe's fault some idiots took horse dewormer after he never mentioned those words? Please show where Joe, actually Joe and not a report of it, once recommended anyone take "horse dewormer" using those words. That was CNN's specific framing and where those words first showed up. They used those words, Joe didn't. Are you aware of that? The first time "horse dewormer" came out of Joe's mouth was in response to CNN's publicly false characterization of what he said.
Haven't heard Jordan's interview yet, but thanks for the heads up. I'm sure there will be something in the 4+ hour interview that I will gain, or will provoke thought, or cause me to go look something up, and some things I don't agree with or learn I was wrong about. Provoking thought is good.
That said if he is smart enough to anticipate what people are going to say and adjust his actions to negate them, you'd think he'd also be smart enough to see that there really isn't any strong evidence for ivermectin being useful, and it's also possible you can take the drug, have no positive or negative effects, and get better from COVID, even if ivermectin made no difference. From that perspective, thing he did that was bad was "not even being wrong" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong) in the sense that we can't say really much of anything about his experience representing a generally useful medical advice.
Rogan is smarter than the average bear, but he's not in the club of the smartest bears.
Actual quote. The guy spins it as "big pharma doesn't want you to know about this" so of course people are going off script. He's a dangerous moron.
> Ivermectin is an FDA approved drug for use in humans to treat a variety of parasitic infections including parasitic worms, hookworm and whipworm. It may also be used as an effective treatment for a wide range of other conditions and as a treatment of onchocerciasis, intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis or river blindness.
*(Outside the context of literally treating horses)
I think ivermectin doesn't work, but there's nothing wrong with a doctor prescribing it off label in a COVID context. It is not unsafe enough, generally speaking, to override the judgement of an individual doctor. The legal/regulatory system explicitly permits this, and there are other examples where doing this is likely ethically positive.
For example, there was a big controversey around lucentis and avastin where doctors found they could treat peoople with wet AMD with avastin far more cheaply, but the pharma (which marketed both) wanted people to use the far more expensive drug. Doctors actively precribed avastin instead of lucentis and treated patients (most case reports coming in positive) and then finally a large trial was run that showed it was basically as good as lucentis. Ethically, in retrospect, we say the doctors were acting in a good way (saving patients for less $$ and probably treating people who couldn't afford lucentis). I could imagine the owner of the two drugs running a PR campaign "Doctors: why are you prescribing a cancer drug to eye patients? Do you want to kill them"?
You can disagree with that tweet and still be for open discussion and against censorship. Also that tweet is very old, people do change there mind. (Not that I'm a fan of Joe Rogan, or know if he still holds that belief)
Also, the rogan tweet links to an article written by Robert F Kennedy Jr, a well-known anti-vaxxer who recently had to apologize for saving covid vaccines were like nazis.
It's trivially easy to have two knowledgeable people or groups who have completely opposing views with seemingly strong cases for both.
What you've got here is an attempt to win this debate by DQ'ing his argument. That's never going to work, not least because it doesn't engage with the substance of what he's saying. Instead, it just invited a bunch of comments sticking up for ivermectin; it had the opposite outcome to what your premise suggests you wanted.
Can you quote exactly which medical advice Joe Rogan gave that was anti-scientific? I am 90% sure that you are saying BS, and that Rogan's advice was not anti-scientific, it was just against your politics.
I could care less about podcasts let alone THAT podcast.
Also Spotify, where is airplay 2? where is hifi? Your data analytics are cool but your core product is starting to fall behind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_(service)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp
There's also Radio Paradise for music discovery. I love it.
This is the reward system we've set up for companies, and things along these lines will be the outcome as a result.
Spotify did the right thing, for potentially the wrong reasons (Profit)
Im not that old, and ive heard all his stuff.
Their take is that censoring Rogan is not the answer. Having a clear, science and common sense based communication free of political meddling is the answer.
Additionally, coming from a dude that based his entire career on singing about the atrocities of government overreach, mob mentality etc. it's pretty disgusting to see him go this direction. It makes me think he really had no fucking clue what he was singing about and was just doing it because it seemed cool at the time.
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Full Definition of authoritarian
1 : of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority
Certainly seems to meet the definition to me. Are you sure you know what it means?
Note that the primary demand is to remove his music. He was under no illusions that he had any sort of leverage over Spotify. He lacked the authority to make demands about their podcasts. He did have the right to pull his own music, and to explain why. Which is what he did.
If you can't see the difference, I can't help you.
That's an ultimatum with markedly authoritarian need for control over what others have access to on a platform. Thanks for proving my point.
>Note that the primary demand is to remove his music.
No it's absolutely not or he would not have ended with the ultimatum. IF what you're saying was true he wouldn't have needed to mention anything about Rogan, he can pull his music whenever he wants.
I'm not sure if you're just naive or you've haven't been properly taught reading comprehension and critical thinking but you're just dismissing half of what Young is saying. I guess the last option is that you're being malicious for some reason. Which is it? I'd have more respect for you if you just admitted you like his authoritarian attitude because you don't care for Rogan.