Neil Youngs music removed from Spotify

*waving hands wildly*

Close the thread! Close the thread! This is gonna be a mess!

Or, he just has principles and sticks by them, regardless of whether or not it’s good for business.

A person can say “I’m not gonna participate in _______ “ without having any illusions about whether it’ll change anything.
Having read a lot about NY (and being a fan for my whole adult life) I feel confident he just decided it was the right thing for him to do. Dude’s always had a spine like rebar.

Pretty sure he knew the outcome. The noise helps make his statement.

The shame is that some dumbass podcast could be considered worth $100M versus what we in the music biz can pull. 

It's purely the "him or me" ultimatum that made it all about ego and censorship.

I 100% agree that if it was a statement he wanted to make, he would have pulled his own music.  Instead, he overestimated his weight and then tried to cancel someone else using it.

Why must certain entities feel the need to moderate, censor, or curate what we listen to? It's a power play on Youngs part. Plain and simple. I can respect his decision. Just do it and be done with it. No drama or armwrestling needed.

Free speech. 1A. It's a cornerstone of the USA. Trying to control one side or the other - no matter which side - is heading downhill into tyranny.   Is that preferable to hearing a dissenting opinion to your preferred narrative?

It’s tricky. I don’t think trying to limit speech is the ultimate answer. It would be better if people just weren’t so seduced by fraudulent B.S. But we are. And opportunists looking to weaponize/monetize that fact abound.

I more or less think we just aren’t grown up enough to handle the internet. We’re a mentally adolescent society (hence the extreme appeal/power of a media product like Rogan’s) and nothing has really prepared us to try and live in a society of hundreds of millions/billions of people. We’re not really wired for it.

I dunno, there are no clean answers to me.

But regardless, NY didn’t try to “cancel” anyone and this isn’t solely about speech. It’s about capitalism/business. NY said, hey, business, you can have me or him (undoubtedly aware that Spotify is only gonna care about the monetary side) and made a ruckus on his way out the door. He’s a polio survivor and has a severely disabled child so he’s been intimately involved with actual medicine and health care his whole life. Not hard to see why his hackles are up over the stuff Rogan has made a fortune trafficking in.

True.  But we don't get a "have your cake and eat it too" situation in life.  Either you try to control a particular narrative at the expense of freedom of speech, or you allow freedom of speech and ideas and let the chips fall where they may.

If you go with freedom of speech, everyone has to be responsible to figure it out for themselves, or if you go with tyranny  -  the powers that be will figure it out for you.  The second will leave approximately 1/2 the population or thereabouts disenfranchised and mega pissed off.  History has a lot of perspective on this....

I choose freedom of speech.  If people don't care to be informed, let them be misinformed.  Ultimately everyone has to be responsible for themselves.

Joe Rogan traffics in all kinds of stuff. He’s not monolithic, and he’s not some pure villain. He might be a helluva nice guy. But he’s an immensely powerful media voice that happens to be destructively gullible (in my view), and contagiously so. He’s also funny and sometimes charming. Like most things, it’s complex, ya know?

But what is all this about stuff being “squashed”? This is all a commercial undertaking. If people doing business on this platform don’t wanna lend their names to what they see as wrong, why on earth would they? In my experience, people who care about truth tend to be the ones who write good songs. And if they don’t want their life’s work propping up something that they see as being anti-truth, why should their voices be silenced?
All of this seems like bedrock, classic freedom of speech stuff. If songwriters don’t wanna be on a platform they don’t believe in, they damn well don’t have to be. If Spotify thinks they’ll make more money off the Edgy Take Bros than the music fans, they can tell the songwriters to pound sand. It’s meat and potatoes free speech/capitalism, in my view.

Yay a new covid thread! 🤣🤣🤣

Seriously though, no matter which side of the fence you’re on in regards to this one, I’d highly recommend actually listening to the episodes that stirred this all up if you haven’t.

open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz?si=7aDvU5aMR5eCDq5-fLgS7g

open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz?si=7aDvU5aMR5eCDq5-fLgS7g

I’ve listened to them both and I appreciate very much that there are still a few places left where an actual discussion can happen. Do I believe everything said in those 2 episodes? Not even close. That’s what I think a lot of people are missing. Millions of people aren’t listening to JRE because they are Joe fans or agree with everything the guests say. We’re listening because we are gathering information in a time that makes very little sense. I’ve heard Joe correct himself, or a guest during the episode or in a follow up episode more times than I can count. When is the last time you got a sincere correction/apology from a mainstream news source?

I actually appreciate Neil Young’s decision to take a stand for what he believes in, even though I disagree with him. Having said that, I am pretty surprised by how clueless he was in this case. This all actually has very little to do with Joe Rogan. Joe’s just the one at least attempting to be fair and genuinely curious. It could be anyone really. People are searching for a “second opinion” when so much over the last 2 years makes zero sense.

You can actually thank CNN for this. When they mocked him for taking “horse dewormer” they screwed up. They knew what they were saying was disingenuous but they did it anyway because they thought they could mock and cancel him like so many others have been. They didn’t realize how much the world has changed and they shot themselves in the foot.

These two episodes have been viewed nearly 100 million times at this point so if you have bought into it just being disinformation or some far right thing then I’d strongly suggest you watch the episodes and take a closer look. The world is changing, the days of a select few news channels deciding what we should believe are long gone.

The media is good at dividing us typically across political or racial lines. They screwed up this time though. The covid hysteria overreach has brought people of all walks of life together. This is way beyond left vs right at this point.

If Neil had said he couldn’t in good conscience support Spotify so he was pulling his music, it would be one thing. He didn’t though he said, “They can have Neil Young or Rogan. Not Both.” Joe would never have done that to another artist. That’s the difference. If Neil was so upset about it he should have put together a concert with other big name artists and invited medical experts he agrees with to speak and correct the disinformation he claims he heard.

But you’re not understanding. No one gives two shits whether NY or Joni Mitchell pulls their music. Totally fine. That’s their right (that’s about the full list of artists that own their own masters however). The problem is that their ulterior motive was to control what Spotify can stream through intimidation. That’s not overstating it. You’re saying they’re innocent political protesters. But that wasn’t their intention.

And I have to say - I rarely listen to JR - but have found several of his interviews entertaining. But your description of him is condescending and - whether you realize it - represents the disdain and sanctimony liberals have for over half of this country. It’s obtuse to say that’s not the crux of the issue.
You’re exactly right: this is a free speech issue. But who was trying to quell that free speech in this situation?

If I thought Rogan was genuinely just trying to seek truth and foster honest conversation, I would be right there with you. And even though I don’t think that, I still think what you’re saying is reasonable.

To me, Rogan suffers from this thing that a lot of dudes do (which jives with the fact that his audience is overwhelmingly male), which is that he loooves to talk and mix it up and get different takes on things…as long as they’re sexy and edgy takes. Truth seeking…as long as the truth is exciting and can be framed as something They Don’t Want You To Know. If 30,000 scientists have one take, which doesn’t excite him, but 1 has an edgy take that fits with the narrative framing of his media product, he’s all frothed up for that 1 edgy take. Which is obviously very good for business, but it isn’t actually seeking the ‘truth’ of the matter. It’s seeking a set of feelings that come with this alluring idea that you’re getting some Special Knowledge that The Media (putting aside for the moment that products like the JRE and various high profile Facebook feeds are The Media now, like you said, things have changed) don’t want you to have.
Again, I don’t think Joe Rogan is some sort of bad guy, I just think he’s a symptom of where we’re at as a society. He’a gullible and influential, which is a bad combination in my view.
But I recognize that many dudes don’t see him like that, and they believe he really is trying to foster genuine conversation. And I guess, to believe that Rogan is acting in good faith, they would have to believe that the real truth of just about every matter does just happen to always be the edgy, sexy, contrarian story. I don’t think that’s true, but I certainly get the appeal.

And I also get that some of you see the move by NY as a strategic mistake. Fair enough. I don’t think it is, but I can see your points.