2024-03-17 16:09:16
Canadian rocker Neil Young has ended a roughly two-year boycott and is returning his music to the Spotify platform. This was reported by the DPA agency. The guitarist and singer removed his songs such as Harvest Moon or Heart of Gold in January 2022 in protest against the fact that the streaming service broadcast the podcast of the influential host Joe Rogan.
Rogan, who had an exclusive contract with Spotify, was criticized in an open letter by scientists, doctors and university professors for spreading misinformation about vaccines against the coronavirus. At the height of the pandemic, they were bothered by, among other things, an episode claiming that the government had “hypnotized” millions of people into getting vaccinated. The presenter and spokesperson of Spotify, where Rogan’s podcast was the most listened to worldwide for four years in a row, later apologized for the statement, the British BBC reminds.
However, musician Neil Young went further and gave the operators an ultimatum. “They can have either Rogan or Young. Not both,” he announced. When the company didn’t respond, he pulled his music from Spotify. His former band Crosby, Stills and Nash and singers Joni Mitchell and India Arie did the same in solidarity with him. All but Joni Mitchell are back.
Now the situation has changed for the Canadian rocker. As of February, Spotify is no longer the exclusive distributor of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The presenter has signed contracts with competing platforms Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon Music worth up to $250 million, the Wall Street Journal found.
Seventy-eight-year-old Neil Young responded to this by announcing that he does not want to download his music from all these places, so he will also return to Spotify. He has not yet specified when exactly he will do so.
“I made the decision after Apple and Amazon started offering the same disinformation podcast that bothered me on Spotify,” Young wrote on his website, without naming Rogan. “If I left Apple and Amazon as well, my music wouldn’t be streaming almost anywhere, so I decided to go back to Spotify,” he added.
Neil Young will go on tour with Crazy Horse this year. | Photo: Daryl Hannah
Neil Young releases music on his own label, distributed through Warner Music Group. Last year, he said he had lost 60 percent of all streaming revenue by leaving Spotify. He did not specify the exact amount of money involved.
Billboard magazine calculated last year that the rocker had 2.4 million followers on Spotify and roughly six million monthly listeners. Without them, he could lose about $16,000 every month. In two years, it could have been a total of up to 400,000 dollars, equivalent to over nine million crowns, according to Billboard. From streaming on other services, Young continued to receive money.
The musician accompanied his current return to the platform with a call for Spotify to increase sound quality and, like competing platforms Tidal or Amazon Music, start offering audio formats with so-called lossless compression. “I sincerely hope they do something about it so people can hear my music the way we recorded it,” he said.
Neil Young has had a successful career as a member of the folk rock band Buffalo Springfield and the all-star Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but has also maintained a successful solo career since 1968. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice and won two Grammy Awards.
The British newspaper Guardian reminds that Young protests against large companies quite often. Last November, for example, he announced that he would boycott the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, after its owner Elon Musk shared an anti-Semitic post. “Tesla should be spreading love, not hate,” Young responded, referring to another well-known Musk company.
Last year, Young also criticized the ticket seller Ticketmaster, which faced criticism in the US for the high prices of concert tickets. “Concert tours aren’t what they used to be. Today, artists are afraid of being ripped off by fans because of Ticketmaster charging extra, or because of ticket resellers,” Young said. Nevertheless, this April with his band Crazy Horse, he is going on an American tour organized by Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster.
Young has released dozens of studio albums, most recently Dume last month, featuring material he recorded with Crazy Horse in 1975 while recording another album. Another title will follow in April, this time a recording of a concert from last November, where Young and his bandmates played songs from the 1990 album Ragged Glory live.