Neil Young demands to quit Spotify over Joe Rogan’s vaccination stance

Neil Young has asked Spotify to remove all his music in protest over vaccine conspiracy theories broadcast by popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

Neil Young says ‘Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them’. Picture: AFP

Neil Young has asked Spotify to remove all his music from its streaming platform in protest over vaccine conspiracy theories that have been broadcast by its most popular podcaster.

In a letter posted on his website, Young said he was asking his management to take “all of my music off their platform” in response to an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” Young said, according to Rolling Stone. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Joe Rogan

The webpage on which the letter was posted appeared to be faulty on Wednesday, but Frank Gironda, Young’s manager, said the issue was important.

“He’s very upset about this disinformation,” he told the Daily Beast. “We’re trying to figure this out right now.”

Rogan, a podcaster with an enormous following, signed an exclusive deal with Spotify in 2020 that was worth more than $SUS100m ($140m), The Wall Street Journal reported.

The show typically features Rogan interviewing a controversial author or academic, discussing hot-button issues in free-ranging conversations that run for hours and draw up to 11 million listeners.

Episode 1757, which was posted on New Year’s Eve, featured Robert Malone, who has been thrown off Twitter for coronavirus misinformation. In their conversation, Malone suggested that coronavirus vaccines were unsafe and that millions of people were being hypnotised by Anthony Fauci, US President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. He said a similar phenomenon had occurred in Nazi Germany.

After the show was broadcast, a series of psychologists said the “mass hypnosis” theory had no basis in science and was based on broadly debunked ideas.

More than 200 scientists, health experts and hospital staff signed an open letter to Spotify, warning that the company was allowing people on its platform to “damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data driven guidance offered by medical professionals”.

Other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook had policies to limit the spread of vaccine misinformation. But Spotify “has no misinformation policy”, the researchers said.

Spotify did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times