In the wake of the events of the past week, it shouldn’t be a mystery as to where I stand on the issues (as if that matters). But, this is my weblog, so to recap…
Estimable rock legend Neil Young decided to up the ante on the growing pushback against Spotify for continuing to provide Joe Rogan with the expansive, lucrative platform he enjoys wherein to disseminate deeply irresponsible misinformation about COVID vaccination (and myriad other hot-button topics). Young warned Spotify that they could either have Neil Young on their platform — arguably the largest streaming platform out there, if I’m correct — or Joe Rogan, not both. Spotify, for their part, crunched their numbers and deduced that removing Joe Rogan’s program from their offerings was not a cost-effective move for them, despite the groundswell of public outcry. Had Spotify consulted, say, Graham Nash, Steven Stills and David Crosby, they’d have gleaned that Neil rarely makes idle threats. Sure enough, Neil made good, and his catalog was excised from Spotify a day or so later.
Then the fun stuff started. Joni Mitchell, an artist I’ll gamely admit that I’ve absolutely NEVER liked, demonstrated her moxie and support for her fellow polio-survivor and Canadian by also removing her sizable catalog of insufferably cloyingly twee music (sorry, … old habits, y’see) from Spotify. Shortly after that, erstwhile E Street guitarist Nils Lofgren followed suit in another show of solidarity. Rumors started swirling about other prominent artists doing same. Suddenly, it’s a trend. Honestly, I’d love to see more of my favorite artists pull the same stunt, but if Spotify doesn’t think losing the catalog of a rock elder statesman is a problem, I doubt losing the oeuvres of Killing Joke, SWANS, DEVO and the Sisters or Mercy would even catch their attention.
Spotify behaving in a dispassionately avaricious manner is certainly nothing new. Since their lucrative advent, they have been fleecing artists left, right and center, paying fractions of pennies in royalties to songwriters struggling to maintain even meager livelihoods as full-time music creators. They are evil money-grubbers. It begins and ends there.
On a personal level, I’ve always been pretty vehemently anti-streaming (although, in the interest of transparency, I do have a long-neglected Spotify account, in much the same manner I have a largely dormant Twitter account). Any artist that sees fit to stick it to quintessential supervillain/Spotify chairman Daniel Ek is a-okay with me. I’m also a longtime Neil Young fan. I also think Joe Rogan is a completely idiotic douchebag for routinely spreading demonstrably false statements about bona fide life or death matters. I expressed as much on a friend’s Facebook feed, about three weeks back, and she blocked me. But people apparently do indeed care what that horrible “bro” has to say. That’s the scary part.
So, given my unwavering allegiance to the physical manifestations of music, my loathing of streaming, my admiration for Neil Young and my abhorrence of slackjawed, wingnut science-skeptics and self-appointed arbiters of “free speech,” I hope Spotify goes all Hindenburg as a result of all this.
On a side note, however, I was bemused to spot an article in The Guardian, this morning from a woman lamenting the difficult choice of quitting Spotify, citing that her Spotify playlists “tell the story of her life.” As if. Honestly, her problem can handily be sidestepped by simply writing down the tunes in her playlists and simply replicating them on whatever next platform she joins. It’s not exactly a crisis akin to the devastation of the entire subculture of music fans who formerly sated their needs via a once-robust network of independent record and disc shops.
If you’re serious about your music, you don’t rely on streaming services. If you’re serious about your health, you don’t listen to fatuous boneheads like Joe Rogan. If you’re serious about defeating COVID, you don’t tolerate misinformation.
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