Spotify Was Never Going to Drop Joe Rogan
WiredThis week, Spotify removed the musical catalog of Neil Young from its platform. Yes, plenty of people are angry at Rogan, including the 270 health care professionals whose highly publicized open letter to Spotify about the podcaster’s content inspired Young. Spotify didn’t give Rogan a reported $100 million in a noble effort to spearhead a public health campaign. But say they did—and say the streamer’s current top four artists, Drake, Ed Sheeran, Bad Bunny, and Ariana Grande, joined forces and yanked their music from Spotify—even then, it is unlikely that Spotify would exile Rogan. Even if Spotify’s C-suite develops a raging guilty conscience over Rogan encouraging young people not to get the Covid-19 vaccine, it wouldn’t be able to moderate his content without implicating itself as a publisher in addition to admitting its responsibility as a platform.