Joni Mitchell pulling music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young

You are quite right of course, i do think Neil Young is making a big mistake here.

Am looking forward to seeing a lot less COVID stories, there are bigger issues that humanity needs to deal with.

The public health mission did an end-run around public discourse. The turbulence caused by that is absolutely the fault of the public health authority.

For a worthy cause people were willing to give their lives. A couple of naysayers can not affect it in any meaningful way. If you can undermine a mission with one measly podcast, that might mean your mission is not in a good place to begin with.

Rogan routinely hosts people with very diverse views. Why wouldn't NY and JM go to Rogan's program and debate him? Why don't YOU go to his program and debate him if you are so certain you have a strong position? If you ask me, I'd say it's very sus, almost like they know they got nothing to say

What is the public health mission and how is Rogan undermining it?

I like this trend of conservatives discovering the concept of monopoly and advocating anti-trust.

Of course I assume this will only apply to narrow issues such as right wingers being deplatformed. For any other issue they'll go back to a maximalist interpretation of corporate property rights.

So this actually a historial thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

I couldn't find anything about protests but people did go on strike in Pullman-Lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#Pullman_lesson

> Should we take away people's right to protest in that city, since doing otherwise would be compelling speech by the company?

I guess, if they didn't like the protesters, they would just say any protesters are on their property and they have the right to eject them or never even let them in. Whilst it was never built (for other reasons) a good example is the Garden Bridge in London. [1]

Despite this looking like publib infra:

"All groups of eight or more visitors would be required to contact the Garden Bridge Trust to request a formal visit to the bridge,” states Lambeth council’s planning report to its committee, which recommends conditional planning. “This policy would not only assist visitor management but also would discourage protest groups from trying to access the bridge.” [2]

Obviously this hasn't been tested at the city level, but the direction of travel ain't great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Bridge [2] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design...

Being banned from a service is not an attempt to permanently deprive anyone of their livelihood. No one has ever starved to death in the street because their Twitter account was closed.

> It's ironic that these Sixties artists who sang about freedom from "the man" are now trying to force a giant corporation to censor another artist.

It would be ironic if artist- and artist-backed-consumer boycotts against giant corporations over actions including political messaging and associations weren't as much a part of the strategy of those same people in the 1960s and the rest of the intervening years as it is today.

I think he deleted those things on his own.

Or they just realized the publicity could get them to sell more albums.

The article is from CNN.com and the cable infotainment networks and traditional media have a very strong interest in tanking alternative distribution channels for content.

14 times worse than Taylor Swift, despite having 3 times the career span and back catalogue? That's about what (90s Danish-Norwegian euro-pop act) Aqua get on Spotify (and tons of other acts besides, even one-hit wonders).

No, but impact on Spotify is (which was my point). No Joni would be equivalent in "lost streams" to no Aqua or no Max Richter.

I feel like greed is the wrong term for the COVID clingers, since it basically means addiction to money in particular, but the COVID clingers are addicted to power.

I don't have cable, but if you have your opinion you should be the one considering different sources of information.

Just the fact that three years, at least, were devoted to the non existent Russia collusion story, and almost nothing else, should be enough to change the channel.

Where by "behave in such manner" you mean people pulling their music from Spotify? Sure, why not? Should they not be allowed to do that?

Nope, that is perfectly fine. If I work for you, and you decide to contract with the military, I will walk away from the job. Acceptable by any measure. This situation is largely the same.

Why is it unethical? Again, the alternative here is that both Young and Mitchell are forced to maintain an association with Spotify against their will, or change their opinion on Rogan (an opinion which many people share and hold to be correct, regardless of whether they believe Rogan should be able to express himself and allow his guests to express themselves in the way he does - and many also do believe he should). Do you consider any of these things to be more just outcomes? No one is being forced to do anything here, there are just two people laying out the conditions under which they continue their relationship with a third party. Neither Young nor Mitchell have actually made any demands here, they have simply stated that they will not continue their relationship with Spotify while they maintain their present relationship with Joe Rogan. Many things can give here - Spotify could drop Rogan, or detail the conditions under which they maintain their relationship, or nothing might happen and Rogan stays on Spotify while Young and Mitchell do not.

I don’t know or care about the law here, unless someone starts getting litigious then it’s really all naval gazing nonsense - like you said, you are not a lawyer, so I’m not going to entertain your theories on how this might be illegal. This is purely a matter of values - I value freedom of speech, and I also value people being able to freely associate with who they like, and that includes saying to someone that they will not associate with them while they maintain an association with someone else.

This is exactly the way I feel. The best way I heard this described just today was by Anthony Fantano on his Twitch stream, where he said that a music streaming service just shouldn’t be in the news this much. That is spot on in my opinion - too much controversy for nothing.

I have never listened to podcasts on Spotify and never will, I use the podcasts app for this and it works quite well for me. I would have been very happy for Spotify to be a music streaming service with a killer app and better support for artists (hell I’d even pay another $5 a month for this, I tried Tidal as I think they pay artists well but I found their app to just not be as good as Spotify’s). As it stands, Joe Rogan makes millions of dollars from his deal with Spotify, while most artists I listen to will probably make pocket money - certainly not nearly enough to make a living, especially during a pandemic when touring is so difficult.

Ultimately I think Joe Rogan isn’t going anywhere unless he sees the writing on the wall and decides to take his millions and build his own platform. Frankly, it means nothing to me - I think it would be great if he stopped bringing on guests who routinely lie about the pandemic, but I don’t listen to his podcast so I just don’t care enough to get up in arms about it. But I absolutely reject the idea that this is censorship and I call it out when I can - deplatforming isn’t censorship, and he isn’t even being deplatformed.

> Spotify is totally free to bankroll Joe Rogan. Others are equally free to feel that this is a bad decision, to criticise it, and to withdraw support in the form of subscriptions or platform participation because they don’t want to contribute to it. Support for freedom of speech does not come with a requirement to support or share a platform with any particular example of speech.

People understand distrinction between 'using your freedom to pursue your happiness' and 'using your freedom in order to punish someone'. Some action can be both 'exercising your liberty to free association' and 'using economic power to oppress others'.

> I don't think anyone is saying Neil Young or Joni Mitchell shouldn't be allowed to do this.

The GP of your post says that this censorship. Another person who replied to me earlier said that this is immoral and possibly illegal. So no, there are in fact some people who are saying that Young and Mitchell either should not do this or should not be allowed to do this.

> doing the bidding of the powerful.

What a silly idea. There is nothing ironic, hysterical, or childish about people who stood against _real_ oppression (the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, conscription into a liar’s war in Vietnam) refusing to associate 50 years later with a business which provides a platform to people telling tales about _fake_ oppression (antivax sentiment, public health measures). Humour me and tell me more about the powerful figures they are doing the bidding of.

It’s entirely on you if you think there is any hypocrisy here. Maybe you just don’t understand what values were espoused by (some) people in the 60s counter culture. There are counter cultures and counter cultures, and while the counter culture of today in the USA might be simple contrarianism, the same cannot be said for that of the 60s, and there is no straight line from one to the other.

That’s not censorship.

Young told his management to tell Spotify to pull his music. No if.[1]

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-youngs-sp...

JRE doesn't have open debates between pro/anti vaccine guests. He gives 3+ hours of air time to vaccine conspiracy theorists with very little pushback. It's easy to get swayed by a contrarian opinion if that's the only one you hear.

Children's hospitals usually admit patients up to about 20. No Child Left Behind included high school students, who may be 18. US child pornography laws include 17 year olds.

Setting those counter-examples aside - in the relevant interview we know Rogan said, quoting https://www.thewrap.com/joe-rogan-slammed-for-deeply-irrespo... :

> “People are worried about them doing it for their children…. both my children got the virus. It was nothing,” he said. “I mean, I hate to say that if someone’s children died from this. I’m very sorry that that happened. I’m not in any way diminishing that. But I’m saying the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing.

He appears to be using the term "children" to mean "minors who are not able to make medical decisions on their own."

His oldest child is 12 years old, which is old enough that the Swedish health authority recommends she be vaccinated.

And remember, this was immediately after saying that healthy 21-year-olds who exercise don't need to get vaccinated - again, counter to the recommendation of the Swedish health authority.

I'll let icare_1er explain how the stance on the JRE matches the Sweden's so well that Joni Mitchell and others should correspondingly stop sales in Sweden. Because I just don't see it.

So is the problem that they aren't acting sooner or that they shouldn't act at all? Because I don't see how an argument that bad stuff is happening invalidates people acting against other bad stuff.

If I may abstract your question to "Why start with a podcast instead of a rapper?", it does make a bit more sense to me to start with a podcast.

At least to me, a podcast has a more informative feel to it than songs. To songs, I listen 100% for entertainment. Could be different for different people, I guess.

I think comments like this trigger cognitive dissonance.

I have no idea how this would work. Spotify has to make a decision about which content it pays for and which it doesn't, so you can't mandate it carry everything without massive changes to copyright. In this reality, it seems literally impossible for Spotify to carry everything that is illegal speech.