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.