Moving away from Spotify

I'm not normally one for jumping on bandwagons, but when I saw friends posting on Facebook over the last few days that they were cancelling their Spotify subscriptions, I figured this was one cause I could get behind.

As many of you will know, a couple of years ago music streaming service Spotify bought the rights to both the back catalogue of Joe Rogan's podcasts and new episodes going forward. Joe Rogan has promoted all kinds of nonsense on his podcast before, where he interviews people on the fringes about their ideas. This has included conspiracy theorists, known racists and UFO believers, although recently he's had a focus on COVID, and unsurprisingly has been promoting dubious cures while casting doubt on vaccines and masks.

It's worth considering what Joe himself had to say about the misinformation on his podcast, which I featured in a previous newsletter:

“I'm not a doctor, I'm a fucking moron, and I'm a cage-fighting commentator who's a dirty stand-up comedian... I'm not a respected source of information - even for me.”

It's a pity Joe doesn't heed his own words and stop promoting opinions he realises are not to be respected - but then Spotify have paid him a lot of money to make his opinions public (~US$100 million).

This week musician Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum - either get rid of Joe Rogan, or remove his music from their streaming service. Having invested a lot of money in Joe, Spotify chose to protect their investment, and removed Neil's music. Apparently 30% of all online listens to Neil's music have been through Spotify, presumably as they are the pioneering streaming service and as the incumbent have a lot of users who signed up when there were no alternatives, users who haven't shopped around since. So this is no small loss for Neil's pocket. Joni Mitchell has also asked for her music to be removed, and given how political musicians can be, I wonder if others will follow.

Spotify's share price has also dropped, with the loss so far being worth a lot more than what they paid for Joe Rogan. However, I don't expect this to be a permanent thing, as markets are both agile and fickle these days, so it's easy to spook investors with a piece of bad news and see a price dip, but often share prices will bounce back fairly quickly. Spotify's share price has been slowly dropping over the last year anyway, so only time will tell whether this will have had any lasting damage beyond what was expected.

It appears that there are a lot of people changing their music streaming provider on the back of this news. There are reports that some people trying to unsubscribe from Spotify are having problems doing so, and that their support line is “unusually busy”, but many people have managed to unsubscribe and people are recommending just removing your payment details if the unsubscribe function doesn't work for you.

Although I don't imagine many people are moving because they want to listen to Neil Young's music, I do think that many people have likely been spurred on by his stand. It's not like Neil Young is a great skeptic, having previously been on the wrong side of the GMO debate, but at least on this issue he's taken an evidence-based position, and understands that Joe has the potential to cause real harm with his “reckons”. In Neil's ultimatum to Spotify he referenced a recent letter to Spotify from medical professionals, imploring them to ditch Joe Rogan. Spotify ignored them as well.

So, like many others, I've cancelled my family Spotify subscription and moved to Google - for a similar price I get their music service and YouTube premium as well - goodbye annoying YouTube ads! Obviously Google, like pretty much any large tech company, is not squeaky clean, but they seem less “evil” than Spotify does right now. I'm not sure if enough people will cancel their subscription for it to make a difference, but even if the numbers jumping ship don't add up to anything significant for Spotify, at least the negative press is likely to give them pause.

Coincidentally, over the last few weeks I've been trying to watch what I would consider to be the most frustrating of Joe Rogan's interviews - those of two other people who have a massively over-inflated sense of self, and who are well known for talking nonsense on a wide variety of topics, rapper Kanye West (or Ye, as he now calls himself) and comedian Russell Brand. Needless to say, even for me (and I'm known for liking cringeworthy nonsense) these interviews have been excruciatingly painful to watch, and I've not managed to finish either of them yet (to be fair, they're each about 3 hours long). Next up might be Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson, although maybe I'm brave enough to try the Alex Jones episodes. I'm spoilt for choice! Sadly, some of the episodes that look like they might be genuinely interesting, such as the one with skeptic Brian Dunning, are not on YouTube.

Do not click play unless, like me, you have masochistic tendencies.