Neil Young vs. Spotify Emergency Roundtable

We know we said that we were taking a pause from publishing as we cook up Season 3 of The Culture Journalist, but we couldn’t resist jumping back in for a quick one-off about a topic we just can’t shake: Neil Young (et al.) vs. Spotify. 

The TL;DR is that Young, on the heels of an open letter by a cadre of scientists, medical professionals, and academics, threatened to pull his catalog from the streaming giant last week if it didn’t do more to curtail the spread of misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. He pointedly called for the removal of one of the platform’s biggest (and most lucrative) sources of said questionable material, The Joe Rogan Experience, writing in a letter to his team: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” 

After Spotify chose to stand by Rogan, Young made good on his word (though he since deleted the above post from his Times-Contrarian website) and has since been directing his fans to check out his tunes on Spotify competitors like Amazon and Apple. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and Graham Nash pulled their music as well, and the hashtag #cancelspotify enjoyed a day or two of virality. 

The situation is still unfolding, and it’s unclear what impact it will have on Spotify beyond a temporary stock price dip and anecdotal reports of users canceling their subscriptions. But the saga — shocker — proved to be a particularly spicy morsel of catnip for the culture wars, sparking arguments around free speech, censorship, and corporate responsibility that feel all the more vertiginous at a time when conservatives are attempting to ban books from school curricula and libraries across the country.

All of which is to say, we’re pretty fired up. After years of observing how Spotify and its peers have impacted the lives of artists and the music industry as a whole, it feels vindicating to finally see the company receive a bit of (mainstream) scrutiny for its controversial business practices. But it’s also been frustrating to watch the reckoning play out in this particular way — like we’re seeing society collectively fixate on the symptoms of the problem and not the fundamental brokenness of a streaming economy that reduces everything it touches to a widget in its unstoppable quest for profit and growth. 

Join us as we contemplate how the fiasco feels like such a perfect storm of internet-era attentional dynamics, how crying “Ivermectin” on a podcast isn’t really that different from crying “fire” in a theater, and whether it’s time to revisit the notion that all the music in the world needs to be free and accessible to everyone, all the time. (At least, if we’re going to rely on for-profit companies to build the architecture that makes it possible).

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