On Friday, Joni Mitchell called a big yellow taxi to pick up her songs and drive them away from Spotify. (Sorry.) She was following the lead of her fellow Canadian musician Neil Young, who demanded earlier last week that Spotify remove his music in protest of its platforming of misinformation about COVID vaccines, specifically via the wildly popular podcast of Joe Rogan, with whom Spotify has an exclusive distribution deal; Young himself was following a recent call from hundreds of science and health professionals objecting to Rogan’s show and demanding that Spotify implement a misinformation policy. (Young published their letter on his website, which is mocked up to look like an old-timey newspaper called the NYA Times-Contrarian.)
Mitchell’s defection answered the question of whether Young would be a one-off, and their call to action continued to generate momentum through the weekend. The rocker and Springsteen collaborator Nils Lofgren, who also performs with Young’s band, Crazy Horse, said that he, too, would sever his ties to Spotify; the alt-rock band Belly said that removing its music from the service would be complicated, but did upload an image to its Spotify homepage instructing listeners to “DELETE SPOTIFY.”
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Source: Joe Rogan, Spotify, and the difference between speech and association | Columbia Journalism Review