Musicians Vs. Spotify: Artists Who Have Joined Neil Young in Removing Their Music

Fellow Canadian and long-time Neil Young friend Mitchell also asked for her catalog to be pulled over concerns about vaccine misinformation being spread on Rogan’s show. In a brief note posted to her official website Jan. 28, the singer-songwriter wrote, “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.” At press time Mitchell’s music was still available on the service.

Like Young, longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band Lofgren cited an open letter from 270 professionals in the scientific and medical communities, calling on the streaming service to address misinformation distributed on the platform in asking Jan. 30 that his music be pulled from Spotify.

In a statement shared to the Neil Young Archives, Lofgren said: “A few days ago, my wife and I became aware of Neil and Daryl [Hannah] standing with hundreds of health care professionals, scientists, doctors and nurses in calling out Spotify for promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people.”

Lofgren noted that 27 years of his music has been taken off the service, and that he is also reaching out to labels that own his earlier music to have those removed as well. “Neil and I go back 53 years,” Lofgren’s statement continued. “Amy and I are honored and blessed to call Neil and Daryl friends, and knew standing with them was the right choice.” He also encouraged “all musicians, artists and music lovers everywhere, to stand with us all, and cut ties with Spotify.”

The Grammy-winning singer expressed solidarity with Young on Feb. 1 when she shared that she’d be removing her music from Spotify. But in an interview, she said her reasoning for requesting that her music and podcast, SongVersation, be taken down goes beyond the rocker’s anger over Rogan’s COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

“One is the Joe Rogan conversation, and for me his language around race and some of the things I’ve seen and heard, but also coupled with that, there is the treatment of artists by Spotify,” she told syndicated talker Tamron Hall, seemingly alluding to a recent episode in which Rogan hosted Canadian psychologist and conservative YouTube personality Jordan Peterson, and had a conversation in which the two white men held forth on questions of racial authenticity while making insensitive, racially charged comments about skin tone.

Arie also said her decision was based on what she said was the wildly unbalanced difference in pay between working musicians and Rogan. “And so artists are underpaid and Joe Rogan gets paid all this money and it’s hard for me to, these days, just sit back and go, ‘Oh, well, that’s how it goes,’” she said, in reference to the long-running complaint from artists that Spotify hasn’t paid musicians enough, even as it reportedly shelled out $100 million for the rights to Rogan’s show in May 2020.

Young’s former CSNY bandmate was one of the first to back him, writing in a statement on Feb. 1 that he “completely agree[s] and support[s] my friend, Neil Young,” without explicitly mentioning his own catalog’s placement on the service, though a rep confirmed he is asking for his solo recordings to be removed.

“There is a difference between being open to varying viewpoints on a matter and knowingly spreading false information which some 270 medical professionals have derided not only false but dangerous,” Nash wrote on Instagram, referring to an open letter sent to Spotify by experts, doctors, scientists and professors expressing concern over Rogan’s platforming of COVID disinformation. “Likewise there is a difference between misinformation, in which one is unaware that what is being said is false, versus disinformation which is knowingly false and intended to mislead and sway public opinion. In this case, in a way that could cost people their lives.”

L.A. cult alt-rock band Failure backed Young’s move on Feb. 1, explaining their exit in a lengthy Facebook post. “Failure have wrestled with the question of Spotify and whether to have our newest music, which we control, on the platform. Until now, our ambivalence about Spotify has been based on their draconian royalty calculation which essentially gives artists a microscopic fraction of the money being generated by their music on the platform,” they wrote, echoing long-running concerns about the modest royalty rate.

“We’ve all seen the stories of just how little Spotify pays artists whose product powers their entire business model. It’s been a scam for artists since the beginning, following in the tradition of the major label model which preceded it. But artists who want to have their music heard by the most ears possible have had a tough decision to make. Do we give our music to a company that devalues our product to the point where royalty checks from Spotify have become the butt of humorous memes, or do we withhold our music from the platform and supposedly miss out on an ‘entire generation of music listeners?'”

The group — co-founded by singer Ken Andrews — added that after Spotify’s “recent policy shift that allows COVID vaccine misinformation to thrive on their platform, Failure have decided that enough is enough. Beyond the moral issues raised by Spotify’s COVID decision, the issue of vaccine misinformation and how it directly affects the current situation in the live music space is simply untenable.”

The band said they fear that Spotify’s “insistence on spreading misinformation” about the ongoing pandemic “directly endangers our band’s supply chain, namely, human beings in a room with big speakers.” As a tip to fans, they suggested they buy lossless digital versions of their catalog on Bandcamp, or stream it on Apple Music or other services.

Though the dream of reuniting CSNY has long faded, Young’s other former bandmates in that 1970s supergroup, David Crosby and Stephen Stills, joined Graham Nash in requesting on Feb. 2 that their labels remove their group and solo recordings as well. Crosby and Still made their ask a day after Nash shared a statement in which he said he “completely” agreed with Young.

In a unified statement, the band members commented, “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences. Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music — or the music we made together — to be on the same platform.”