Neil Young Puts Spotify On The Spot

Neil Young Puts Spotify On The Spot

– By Ed Kociela –

Neil Young has been a curmudgeon since he emerged from the womb.

He’s an irascible character who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but that is commonly a byproduct of genius, an often used superlative that rarely fits. By most accounts, the word is a spot-on descriptive of Young, his amazing body of work, and his social consciousness.

Neil Young finds himself, today, at the heart of a steaming conflict with Spotify, a giant in the streaming business that offers music and podcasts — some free, others on tiered-pay levels that don’t even approach walking around money for the artists.

Young has a rich catalog ranging from his days with Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and, of course, his solo ventures. As one of the most prolific and gifted artists just this side of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, what he realizes from the Spotify streaming is virtually chump change even though the site is highly monetized as a result of music-starved subscribers and corporate investment.

Last week, Young demanded that Spotify remove his catalog from its playlist, not because of money or placement or prestige, but because the service also offers “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a blogcast heavily laced with misinformation regarding COVID-19 and conspiracy theories with absolutely no basis in fact.

Rogan has used the show as a vehicle to promote specious “cures” for the disease and features guest appearances from people like Alex Jones, a far-right whack job so deep into conspiracy theories that his anchor runs deeper than the Titanic. Jones has claimed that the government has held back information about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the moon landing. He’s in league with the loonies who claim the government is shooting us up with tiny chips in the COVID vaccines and that the United States is colluding with other nations to create a New World Order.

Recently Rogan featured Dr. Robert Malone, another conspiracy theorist who has compared pandemic policies to the Holocaust. Malone, by the way, has been suspended from Twitter for posting misinformation about COVID.

There have been others who have pushed for unproven, untested concoctions as cures and preventative measures to fight COVID, which we will not mention here out of a sense of responsible commentary and the possible danger they could pose for the community.

Rogan, who by giving those people a platform, is responsible for providing false information even though, of course, he doesn’t have the chops to back up any of the nonsense.

He’s a comedian at heart, a guy who scratched out a living by working the nation’s comedy clubs. He had a few network gigs that he rather passively pursued to pay the bills but made his mark as the host of the underwhelming “Fear Factor” reality show, where contestants were asked to do such outrageous things as eat lamb’s eyeballs or be contained in a coffin filled with snakes or rats or other vermin. When that piece of media detritus wore out its welcome he moved on to do color commentary for mixed martial arts competitions.

Still, he found an audience and his blogcast freak show draws enough of a following to persuade Spotify to have him under wraps with a $100 million contract.

Young joined some 270 health professionals, practitioners, and researchers who wrote an open letter to Spotify to voice concerns about what they consider “false and societally harmful assertions” made on the Rogan show and asked Spotify to set a “clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”

“I realized I could not continue to support Spotify’s life-threatening misinformation to the music-loving public,” Young said in an open letter.

The suits at Spotify opted to stand by their $100 million investment.

Young stood by his principles and pulled his music. He was quickly joined by Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren. David Crosby and Peter Frampton issued statements supporting Young’s decision.

Normally, I would do the knee-jerk thing and say that Rogan has a 1st Amendment right to say what he wishes.

Except this is different.

Very different.

You see, lives really are at stake here.

And, as former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in Schenk v. United States, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” Holmes believed that only instances of clear and present danger warranted placing limits on free speech. There is a clear and present danger in the misinformation being blathered by Rogan and his guests.

Young has been a consistent supporter of free speech, releasing, through the years, songs with biting lyrics, critical commentary, social responsibility.

After the Spotify story broke he made it clear his position has not changed.

“I support free speech,” he wrote on The Neil Young Archives. “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.”

The question here is this: Are you going to listen to somebody who admits they are not steeped in science but suggest you follow the guidelines of those who are or are you going to listen to somebody who traffics in outlandish conspiracy theories that are totally without merit or substance? Neil Young may be a crusty old rock star, but I’ll put my money on him.

So have a lot of other people, I guess, because, within two days of removing his music from Spotify, the streaming service stock fell 12 percent, week-on-week, a loss of $4 billion in market capitalization.

It is the only measure that could possibly provoke social media giants like Spotify, Facebook, and others to develop a sense of accountability for what appears on their platforms.

Until then, we’ll have to deal with guys like Rogan, Jones, Tucker Carlson, and all the other purveyors of this garbage.

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