Neil Young Forces Spotify to Choose Between Him and Joe Rogan. Spotify Chooses Rogan
“It’s better to burn out, than to fade away.”
Legendary rocker Neil Young recently issued an ultimatum to the platform Spotify, which broadcasts many of his songs, as well as Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
Like many Boomer celebrities who once proudly declared themselves anti-establishment rebels, Young has become nothing more than a preening Karen who dislikes Rogan’s show for allegedly spreading misinformation about COVID.
Young’s demand was basically ‘either he goes or I do’ and you might say he chose poorly.
Spotify basically told Young not to let the door hit him on the way out.
Hannah Frishberg reports at the New York Post:
Spotify sides with Joe Rogan, removes Neil Young’s music: ‘A costly move’
Spotify has sided with its podcast superstar over Neil Young.
The legendary folk singer gave the streaming behemoth an ultimatum earlier this week, saying he refused to allow his music on the same platform as Joe Rogan. The “Heart of Gold” singer accused Rogan and his podcast of spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million deal to be the exclusive home of Rogan’s show. Young, meanwhile, stands to lose 60% of his streaming income from his defiant stance, he said in a statement on his website…
Since the start of the pandemic, the spokesman noted, Spotify has removed more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes. Still, Young’s protests were not sufficient for it to drop its lucrative star talker.
“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon,” the spokesperson added.
Rogan’s podcast has attracted an estimated 11 million listeners.
Young greatly overestimated his own influence, while vastly underestimating that of Rogan. Spotify knows which side of its bread is being buttered.
The great Ace of Spades weighed in on this as only he can:
Spotify to Neil Young: We Accept Your Conditions. We Are Removing Your Shitty Music From Our Service.
Neil Young, greatly, greatly overestimating his relevance and clout, demanded that Spotify either drop Joe Rogan or drop him.
Spotify thought about this for five minutes — four minutes and fifty six seconds were taken up trying to figure out who Neil Young was (He’s not an astronaut, is he?) — and then decided, “Uh, yeah. Okay, bye-bye then.”…
Is Spotify removing his music to spare itself the headache, then? Or out of spite?
Note that that last possibility is not out of the question: they have a strong business incentive in laying down the law as far as artists making demands like this. Imagine all of these prima donna, leftwing opinion-shrieking Artistes all making demands like this. Or rappers saying “Drop my rivals’ music or drop me!”
No — best to lay down the law with a has-been like Neil Young and let the rest know, “We’re not playing, we’ll drop you like a bad habit.”
Read the whole thing. Trust me.
There are already some great memes floating around.
— McMurphy Memes (@mcmurphy_pat) January 26, 2022
Let’s pour one out for the music of Neil Young. Sing along with me. Hey, hey. My, my. Neil Young got booted by Spotify…
Neil Young half of featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
“The legendary folk singer …”
Folk singer?
Not the way I remember him either. More like an opportunist angry young man. Wealth and fame in that routine if you are good at it.
Springsteen made it work.
Springsteen?!!!! They are the same breed.
Demonstrators came out Saturday ahead of The Boss’s show, Springsteen on Broadway, holding signs and chanting in protest of the theatre’s policy that required attendees to bring proof of vaccination.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3167461/anti-vax-protests-bruce-springsteen-broadway-segregation/
He is suck a crybaby. Sadly, I really liked CSNY 4 Way Street. NY and Crosby are douchbags. Woke Jokes.
We had a smash Springsteen Record party in High School. The whining river song makes me puke. Give me Bob Seger and Ted any day. Detroit is all about Rock and Roll.
Douche Springsteen is a real man of the people, believes in all those social programs, just not paying for them. hides his money from the tax man with his 2 goat “farm” estate in NJ.
Then he does that sickening thing with Obama where he called all his fans racists, agrees with BO that his if his fans saw Clarence Clemons in a bar they’d use racist slurs. He and BO both have their fake accents; Obama has his blaccent for the POC and Springsteen does some kind of bullcrap southern accent.
Love them or hate them, CSN, then CSN&Y did some of the most amazing harmonies, and didn’t need electronics to do it.
He’s a little bit folky
And a little bit rock n roll
It’s been so long since he released anything that charted that they can’t remember his genre.
Relevance check – failed
Lynyrd Skynyrd nailed it almost 50 years ago… ‘a Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.’
Fuck Nail Young and all the other petty wanna be tyrants.
So Spotify identifies as a Southern man?
I prefer “Rust Never Sleeps (Into the Black)” but both are outstanding.
Young has always been a preening lefty but this time he badly misread the tea leaves. There is no way Spotify would drop Rogan for an aging rocker who hasn’t produced much of significance in over a decade.
The precedent would also be catastrophic for Spotify.
Or, could this be a well calculated move on Young’s part? Will the uber lefties flock to Young now on Apple Music and elsewhere more than offsetting his losses on Spotify? Could this be a brilliant stroke of capitalist/marketing genius on the part of the old guy?
Last hit he had was in 1987 or so. I really liked Crazy Horse. Oh well, maybe he can go down to the river and find a cowgirl in the sand
Or a cinnamon girl.
But, Neil Young was willing to give up his $1.73 monthly Spotify royalty check. Clearly a man of principle. (Of course, he has had more activity on the other platforms this week than in the last 5 years.)
Rockin’ in the Free World, 1989.
Nope. He’s a has-been.
The GREAT irony is that one of Neal Young’s big hits was “Needle and the Damage Done”!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49M10VIXPk4
He never SANG anything. Whined, yes. Not but not sang.
Damn! How many senior citizens are on this page?
I prefer ‘old and decrepit’ it rolls off the tounge better. Unless you are giving me a discount, then I’m all senior citizen. 😉
I dunno. Could you hand me my cane and untangle my oxygen tube so I can hobble to the door and get my meals on wheels?
I’m past senior citizen; I am elderly. 73 is visible and coming fast.
As it is, I listened, and still listen to, the music my parents liked, or danced to during the last war our nation won.
That was good music. Clean and fun.
Two thumbs up for that!
Clean, fun, and preceded the days of the melatron. You actually had to have a voice.
How old is that in bear years, not counting time out for hibernation?
219 Grizzly years. In the wild they are generally gone by age 25.
I’ve been calling him “neil the squeal” for 40 years.
Imagine? Neal Young narc-ing out Joe Rogan.
What’s Spotify?
I’ll miss NY’s music on Spotify. He’s in many places on my play list. The Southern Man he was talking about was the antebellum sort although when he wrote that the South didn’t have such a stellar record of civil rights. Besides, I don’t like Lynard Skinard anyway. I may just listen to Joe Rogan now.
I’m not so sure why Young is so worried about a flu that has a 99.97% survival rate.
I am forever getting mixed up between Neil Young and Neil Diamond. Who gave them permission to have the same first name?
Now I’ve got Jonathan Livingston Seagull stuck in my head….
The difference:
Young: whine-sings
Diamond: causes sugars in US diabetics to spike 36 points or more.
For our rest-of-the-world readers: spike two points.
Oh, damn, there’s metric sugar, too?
Both systems are based on metric measure. The US uses one of them, the entire rest of the world uses the other.
This morning, my reading was up a bit. It was 142. In the rest of the world, it would be 8.9. The ratio is near-as-darn-it 18:1
Neal Young was very talented in his heyday, but Neal Diamond is more mainstream, a more prolific hit-maker.
Neal Diamond: the heart-throb of blue-haired women from Las Vegas to Atlantic City.
His new song, “Hey, hey, my, my, I lost my Spotify.”
I’ve recognized that Young is pompous ass for a decades. Now I see that he has decided to share his inner silly doofus with the rest of the world. What an obnoxious jerk.
I had never heard of him in particular until he started spouting his opinions back in, IIRC, the 1980s, and I decided he was a drug-addled crank.
Only more recently have I been willing to admit to myself that he made some good music — but I don’t seem to have any of it in my personal collection.
Not knowing which selections he still owns the rights to, I’m leery of adding any.
They sided with the money. Is anyone surprised?
Businesses are run to make money. Anything wrong with that? NY apparently thinks otherwise, to his loss. Bad business decision on his part. Also, Spotify doesn’t exist to promote any particular point of view. There was room for NY and JR. It was NY who decided the platform wasn’t big enough for both of them. Spotify agreed with him.
Neil who?
Neil was a St. Bernard dog in the move, and later TV series, Topper. He was known to drink his own brandy.
He sold half the rights to his music last year for over $100 million, that investor can’t be happy that Young took away his revenue stream.
Well, that’s interesting. Could Spotify identify the songs to which NY sold his rights, and then continue to play only those songs and tell NY to take a hike?
If the owner of said rights wants to keep them on there then yes.
Some sheiks-ter lawyer may find a suit in there somewhere.
Shyster…
Shiek-ster lawyer may work too, as I’ve heard that it was a Saudi that bought half his portfolio.
All I have for Neil is:
Old man, take a look at your self,
You’re a washed up fool…
Entertainers should entertain, and limit their politics to their….particular idiom… Neil Young was always seemed to have a high opinion of himself anyway. I doubt I’ll miss his music.
I love it when a would-be canceler ends up canceling himself.
I’ll never forget the response from one of those advice columnists — Ann Landers, Dear Abby, or maybe even the very correct Emily Post — to a new bride agonizing over the ultimatum she got from an invitee: “If so-and-so got invited, I’m not coming.” The advised response was, “Oh, that’s so sad, we’ll all miss you!”
Now old Neil is just another Ass With No Name.
Funny how people who can’t even keep their personal relationships together would think society would be well-served following their advice on subjects where an expert is required
In the seats the home crowd scatters
For the turnstiles
I think I understand the spirit of your post, but you are giving him far too much credit.
This isn’t advice; this is an ultimatum…and a pretty hard, self-inflicted bad beat if you ask anyone with a pulse.
A whole bunch of liberals are now going to pretend they will cancel their spotify accounts…while not doing so because they can’t be without their ariana grande and tay swift playlist.
Irony Rockin’ in the Free World.
Wow! That Neil (whoever he is) sure showed spotted dish!
Neil Young stands with “The Man”
Proverbs 16:18
Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall.
“ARRR!!! Avast, ye haughties!”
/practicing for Talk Like a Pirate Day
(Do we) find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Graham Nash condemned anti-vaccination campaigner Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for co-opting his song “Chicago” in a video promoting a protest event.
Read More: Graham Nash Condemns Anti-Vaxxer For Co-opting His Song ‘Chicago’ | https://ultimateclassicrock.com/graham-nash-condemns-anti-vaxxer/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
his work on “philadelphia” was beautiful–both the soundtrack and the title song were wonderful
when he sang with cs&n he definitely embellished their already gorgeous harmony
re: his politics–for as long as can remember, he’s been somewhat of a lunatic
Neal The Narc.
Hippies must be turning in their graves.
I saw this meme today in passing. I don’t know who to give credit to.
Americans under age 30. Who is Neil Young?
Americans age 30 to 60. Why do we care about Neil Young?
Americans over 60. What’s Spotify?
I’m thinking of writing a history of the shaker hood scoop.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/shaker-style-hood-scoops
Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well I heard ol’ Neil put her down
Well I hope Neil Young will remember
[America doesn’t] need him around anyhow.
So Neil Young’s last hit or song of note was what 35 or 40…hell maybe 50 years ago. Because the ave age of a Spotify user is 24 he delusionally thinks he has millions of 24 year fans…hint…he doesn’t. Oh and he isn’t making a grave 60% of his income sacrifice to take his stand for big government and big pharma…he sold most of his song rights a year or so ago so he doesn’t even have skin in the game. What a has been loser sell-out
Somebody should check that the irrelevant Neil’s gun is still loaded so he can shoot his irrelevant self in the other foot. I’m overjoyed that Rogan won out over the leftist asshat.
Periodically, SiriusXM opens up a limited-run channel. Imagine my amazement and surprise to hear they just opened a limited run channel of…. Neal Young!
A real kick in the B***s for Neil to realize that he is no longer relevant. SUCK IT UP NEIL!!!!!!!!!
Neal Young?, You mean 3 note Neal thats has a voice like Fingernails on a chalkboard?. in 40 years of playing Jukeboxes I have never heard anyone play his songs including myself. He has become Irrelevant for over 40 years. his best year are behind him sense “Rust never sleeps”. He is a old time Liberal who won many years ago and NOW wants to go back to those years and dwell on it. ALL the LiB musicians Are doing it. They are DEPERATE and Lost their Identity and what they fought for ..Its 2022 you Idiots GROW UP…MOVE FORWARD. Things are a lot better then in the past
Joni Mitchell, another one who has done nothing notable in decades, just pulled from Spotify “in solidarity” with Mr. Young.
I liked her work back in my dear dead college days, but moved on. So have others.
Haha! I saw that and was actually surprised that she’s still alive. I could have sworn she died a decade ago.
These decrepit old hasbeens are doing themselves no favors by reminding people they are not only alive but completely brain dead big government zombies.
I may be jaded but she ‘might’ be doing this to talk up some buzz. They are in early development of a Broadway musical called “Joni the Musical”
https://newyorkbroadwaytours.com/christy-altomare-to-star-in-developmental-reading-of-joni-the-musical/