

(As a viral tweet last week put it: “Taylor Swift could end Joe Rogan with a single tweet at Spotify.”) In practice, it’s a bit more complicated than that, in part because record labels, not musicians, generally control streaming rights. A leading music streaming service like Spotify needs to have popular hits in its library, which means that, in theory, musicians with enough firepower could force change simply by threatening to remove their albums. Chappelle, Spotify can probably breathe easy on this front for now.īut Spotify has a different constituency to worry about: stars.


And given how few Netflix subscribers appear to have canceled their subscriptions during last year’s dust-up with Mr. Rogan unless there’s a wave of account cancellations. Spotify, by contrast, makes most of its money from subscriptions, so it’s unlikely to suffer financially from its handling of Mr. (Whether these boycotts actually accomplish anything is another question.) YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are ad-supported businesses if advertisers disagree with moderation decisions, they can threaten to inflict financial damage by pulling their campaigns. Rogan’s show inside its app, gives the company more responsibility for his show than others it carries.Īnother difference is who wields the leverage in this conflict. Critics say that deal, along with the aggressive way Spotify has promoted Mr. The streaming service paid more than $100 million for exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020, making him the headline act for its growing podcast division. Rogan’s Spotify standoff is different from most other clashes between creators and tech platforms in a few key ways.įor one, Spotify isn’t merely one of many apps that distribute Mr. Rogan, it committed to putting advisory warnings on podcast episodes about Covid-19, and directing listeners to a hub filled with authoritative health information.ĭespite its surface similarities, Mr.
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Brené Brown, another popular host, soon followed, saying she would not release new episodes of her Spotify-exclusive podcast “until further notice.”ĭaniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, published the requisite blog post on Sunday, defending the company’s commitment to free expression and saying that “it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor.” And while Spotify declined to take action against Mr. Rogan’s interviews with Spotify’s stated rules, which prohibit material “that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive content about Covid-19.” Two folk-rock legends, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, led the boycott, pulling their catalogs from Spotify last week in protest of the platform’s decision to support Mr. So far, the backlash cycle is hitting most of the usual notes. Global Threat: New research shows that nearly three-quarters of respondents across 19 countries with advanced economies are very concerned about false information online.Media Literacy Efforts: As young people spend more time online, educators are increasingly trying to offer students tools and strategies to protect themselves from false narratives.Russian Falsehoods : Kremlin conspiracy theories blaming the West for disrupting the global food supply have bled into right-wing chat rooms and mainstream conservative news media in the United States.Election Fraud Claims: A new report says that major social media companies continue to fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods Rogan had a “concerning history” of promoting falsehoods about the virus.
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This month, a group of hundreds of medical experts urged Spotify to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation, saying Mr. Rogan was accused of promoting Covid-19 misinformation on his show, including hosting a guest who had been barred by Twitter for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines. The audio giant has faced calls for weeks to take action against Joe Rogan, the mega-popular podcast host, after Mr. Facebook and Alex Jones, Twitter and Donald Trump, YouTube and PewDiePie, Netflix and Dave Chappelle: Every major platform has found itself trapped, at some point, between this particular rock and a hard place. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because a version of it has occurred on every major internet media platform over the last half decade. Days later, the chief executive is forced to choose between barring a popular creator - and face the fury of his fans - or being seen as a hypocrite and an enabler of dangerous behavior. The platform’s employees threaten to walk out.
