Because one of the primary ways they’re trying to corner the podcast business is by contracting prominent podcasts as exclusives.
Rogan is the biggest name in that. But most of the others aren’t big piles of garbage people.
That convinced a lot of people to give it a shot. I didn’t really feel like maintaining 2 podcast apps, so never got around to stripping everything but the exclusives out of Spotify and setting up another option for the rest of it.
Many of them appear to be getting better offers from other parties, and leaving though.
I don’t think he’d have much of a problem with being off Spotify.
Owing to Young’s epic level of audiophile nerdom he avoided putting his music on streaming services in the first place. And has repeatedly pulled his catalog from various services in the past. He was all over Tidal’s higher quality streaming options, and attempted to launch his own streaming service based around lossless formats.
He was even involved in a lawsuit against Spotify for listing artists music without rights or royalty agreements. And he’s been loud about rights and compensation problems with streaming platforms in general.
Not to say he’s not being honest about why he’s doing this. Just that he’s long been side eyeing these people and he doesn’t neccisarily view pulling his music as a negative.
It was probably more about giving them an opportunity to respond, than expecting it’d go any other way.
It’s been reported that Spotify’s podcast push has been a financial disaster. They spent hundreds of millions on it, and it’s apparently been a failure. It didn’t bring in anywhere near as many users as they thought, and apparently isn’t generating near as much income as the music end.
That kinda gives Rogan even more pull though. He’s a little bit the last man standing on prominent exclusives, their one big draw.
Neil Young has long been against corporate commercialism.This is from an article about his 1988 song:
“MTV, you spineless twerps,” he wrote in an open letter. “You refuse to play ‘This Note’s for You’ because you’re afraid to offend your sponsors. What does the ‘M’ in MTV stand for: music or money? Long live rock and roll.”
I don’t think he had any illusion that he was worth more to Spotify than Rogan. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do the right thing. A lot of artists aren’t in a position where they can afford to ditch Spotify but he is and so he did. Maybe some users will follow suit and cancel their subscription, maybe other artists will follow his example. Maybe none of that will happen but people will remember that he gave up 60% of streaming revenue because he didn’t want to be on the same platform as a dangerous covidiot.
Why? What he did was force them to publicly make the choice. I cancelled my spotify subscription today, which I don’t even use to listen to Neil Young because he made the point pretty clearly that even when forced to make a clear, conscious, and public choice they choose poorly.
Why? Because it gives validation to people who support Joe Rogan’s anti-vax views.
Given the headline 1) “Young leaves Spotify to denounce its support of Joe Rogan” sounds much better for Neil Young than 2) “Spotify chooses Joe Rogan over Neil Young”. Message is clearer.
They should have spent some of that money on actually making a good podcast player. The few times I’ve tried it have been an epic failure. I’ll admit to using Spotify (mostly because one of the kids has had it for years and a family plan was cheaper than a different service, cheap over principals this time, sorry).
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Way more than I listen to Spotify. The experience of listening to them is fundamentally different than listening to background music or the radio. Podcast listening is much more like listening to an audiobook. The entire Spotify player seems to be optimized for picking a type of music and then listening on shuffle for the most part. Maybe you hit a playlist in order, but shuffle is really the target. For me, this works fine in the car with others when I don’t want the radio and as a replacement for Sirius/XM. Or, background music at dinner.
If you’re on an iPhone, highly recommend Overcast.
(Yeah, I’m on an iPhone and use Spotify, clearly I’m a bad person.)
I actually have a lot more to thank Neil Young for.
I grew up listening to “Ohio”, among other protest songs. In the 80’s I was at a church sermon where the “pastor” (who married us!) said something like “and thank you Lord for giving strength to our National Guard so they can stand up to rioters charging them like on the Ohio campus.” I was stunned beyond the ability to shout down the monster (and still regret not having done so.)
From that one horrible lesson, my world view about religions changed. I learned that “religious people are 100% full of shit; they’re evil rat fuckers that don’t deserve the time of day, let alone money, special treatment, or legal protections,” and I dropped all pretenses of going to church. There’s no way to sort out the good messages from the bad when they’re always lying about their invisible sky friends anyway.
And even if there was a Jesus who died for our sins, he wasted his effort by letting scum like that steal his name.
On the back end as a creator it’s apparently every bit the disaster. To the point where creators will upload a new episode then it will “get stuck” for weeks instead of publishing.
And contrary to expectations given the very expensive deals they’ve made for big podcasts. Their in house productions are where they’re spending the most. Absolutely none of them have been even a moderate hit.
Because the app sucks so hard, apparently very few of the people signing up to get at the podcasts have signed up for subscriptions, and the ad revenue from Rogan isn’t nearly enough to offset the expense.
Yeah. People kept sending me Spotify playlists, so I downloaded the app, but never got around to setting up an account. I’m glad I waited. I just uninstalled it. Not because I was likely to listen to Neil Young, but because the story made me aware of the massive Spotify/Rogan deal. I’m not going to support that bullshit even indirectly.
I think he knew pretty well which way the wind was going to blow, given Spotify’s enormous investment in Rogan.
Huh, his Spotify deal was reportedly worth $100 million. So that one deal makes up the vast majority of his fortune? Yikes. Damn, now I really want Spotify to take him “off the air” (as it were). It would be pretty funny if Spotify got exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast… only to then never allow them to be heard.
Given he was dead, I don’t think he had much say in the matter.
And of course, I hate to have to say it, but… not all religious people are bigoted, small-minded assholes. Plenty are doing the work and pushing for a more progressive society. Some have even paid for that with their lives. That dichotomy has always been there - authoritarianism vs freedom/progressivism. I say we fight along side whoever is on the side of real freedom and progress, because that’s the kind of world we hope to build - inclusive, tolerant, accepting, etc.
But clearly, your former pastor was not one of those.
Right. If this was 1995, different story. Then again, I’ve been reading articles about the biggest growth category for streaming services – spotify included – is older music. I wouldn’t totally count Mr. Young out if he leverages his connections to other stars of yesteryear.
Young apparently sold a 50% share of his catalog for $150m a few years back.
That seemed low to me. A catalog from a prominent artist like Young can be worth billions in the long run, from rights and licensing as well as distribution revenue like streaming or radio.
Obviously Spotify doesn’t have that kind of investment in access to Young’s stuff. Though I think they had to cut a deal with his management company in the wake of that lawsuit. And that settlement itself was probably pricey.
I don’t know that too many people are dropping Spotify or opting not to sign up specifically because they can’t get Neil Young songs.
But if other artists follow suit, and they have in the past, Spotify gets a content problem.
The entire pitch on streaming music services is access to everything. If a bunch of prominent things just aren’t there? Who subscribes?
The issue with Rogan is he’s propping up Spotify’s podcast investment right now.
Looking at some of the options presented here for alternatives for podcasting to Spotify and the desktop experience i’ve seen so far is less than ideal. Though i think the Google podcasts is going to fit my needs best when i need to jump between mobile and PC
