Joe Rogan, Neil Young, and the Spotify Kerfuffle

I’m not a Joe Rogan fan. For most of the years of my awareness of him he was just the idiot that hosted Fear Factor. What little I’ve seen of his standup was sub-mediocre. I’ve never listened to his inexplicably popular podcast. From what exposure I’ve had to him, he seems like just another unfunny idiot white man. He doesn’t, however, seem to be a bad guy. He doesn’t strike me as a malicious or exploitative profiteer, at least no more than other men like him in positions like his.

My understanding of Rogan’s position is that he brings on whatever guests he finds interesting and then lets them talk. He then just questions them and listens as though they’re interesting and authoritative, whether they are or not. It’s like what journalists do, except he’s not a journalist, and so perhaps doesn’t ask probing questions or challenge his guests when they say something idiotic. He then ends up parroting things he’s heard from them after filtering them through his own idiot brain. Which is how he received criticism for idiot things he’s said about Covid and vaccines. Rogan’s biggest fault is that he’s an idiot. And a racist. He’s made racist comments and used the N word too freely. And he apparently hosted actual neo-nazis and didn’t challenge their hateful idiot beliefs. Those are his three biggest faults.

Neil Young had his music taken off Spotify after giving the company the ultimatum of choosing between him and Rogan, and they of course chose Rogan. Young contracted polio in his youth, and so has a personal reason to take umbrage with assholes promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric. His position is understandable and respectable, if not completely on point. If all Young wanted to do was make a statement, then he succeeded, but if it was actually his intention to get Rogan removed from the platform, then he failed embarrassingly. After Spotify paid Rogan a hundred-million dollars to publish his podcast exclusively not that long ago, they’re not about to drop him. That would be a huge waste of money, much more than Young brings in for them. Even adding Joni Mitchell, and others who joined Young, doesn’t add up to an equal loss.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell aren’t moving the needle. Great musicians though they may be, their cultural powers, and more importantly their cash-earning powers, have waned over the past half-century. They have fans on Spotify, millions of monthly listeners, but the majority of subscribers don’t care or won’t even notice that their music has been removed. Young and Mitchell just aren’t hitting with the youth of today. Whatever is hitting with the youth of today, it’s not 70s folk. If Beyonce, BTS, and Megan Thee Stallion or whoever else people listen to a lot on Spotify were to throw their anti-Rogan support in, that might have an effect.

In an ethically confusing turn, Neil Young has hyped the fact that his music is still available on Amazon Music, praising the evil capitalist behemoth for “leading the pack in bringing Hi-Res audio to the masses,” adding, “it’s a great place to enjoy my entire catalog in the highest quality available.” While I sympathize with him not wanting to share a platform with Joe Rogan or to allow Spotify to profit from his music, Amazon is not a morally superior platform. Apart from being a corrupt and malicious corporate monstrosity run by one of the most exploitative monsters ever to walk the earth, it also sells all manner of right wing and anti-vax products. You can buy merchandise supporting and/or profiting everyone from Donald Trump and Sarah Palin to Alex Jones and Joe Rogan on Amazon. You can stream Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, and many other awful podcasts. Amazon Music even has a page for Alex Jones’ podcast, though as of this writing I wasn’t able to get the episodes to play, so they may have kept them up but blocked their streamability as a half-measure, perhaps waiting for people to forget what a disgusting, lying, criminal diarrhea-monster Jones is. All that scum is much worse platform company than Rogan. So either Young is a hypocrite or he’s done little due diligence.

There are far worse podcasters than Rogan. There are many more horrible podcasts than his, sharing everything from far worse misinformation to outright hate speech. Rogan is only getting this much attention because of his aforementioned inexplicable popularity. The framing of him as some particularly harmful enemy of science and decent culture is exaggerated and silly. There are substantial problems with Spotify, like that they pay artists between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on average, roughly the same or more than Amazon Music incidentally, while raking in billions in profits, and shelling out hundred-million dollar contracts to guys like Joe Rogan. Their pathetic and exploitative business practices are a reason for an artist to not work with the streaming company. If Young and others left the platform for that reason, they’d be justified. It could be that moral issues like vaccine misinformation could just be one more reason, the last straw in the camel’s hump.