CSNY is sticking together. David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills are supporting their bandmate Neil Young and have requested that their labels remove their group recordings from Spotify.
Crosby and Stills have also requested to remove solo recordings, a day after Nash shared a statement in which he “completely agree[s] and support[s] my friend, Neil Young,” and a rep confirmed he is asking for his solo recordings to be removed.
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In a unified statement on Wednesday (Feb. 2), 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.”
The dispute between Young and Spotify began when Young released an open letter Jan. 24 demanding his catalog be removed from the streaming service due to the misinformation spread by Joe Rogan, whose Joe Rogan Experience podcast is exclusive to Spotify as part of a reported $100 million deal signed in May 2020. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren and India.Arie were among the artists to follow suit, and over the weekend, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek released a statement saying the streaming service would introduce an advisory on podcasts that discuss COVID-19.
On Monday (Jan. 31), Rogan shared a 10-minute statement to Instagram, in which he promised to “balance things out” amid his Spotify controversy.
He admitted that he’s not “trying to promote misinformation” with his podcast, and chose to bring on vaccine skeptics such as Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough as guests “to hear what their opinion is.”
“I had them on and because of that, those episodes in particular were labeled as being dangerous — they had dangerous misinformation,” Rogan explained, before adding that he’ll “do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view.”