(By Travis M. Andrews, Washington Post, 28 January 2022)
Neil Young, left, and Joe Rogan. (AP)
In one corner was Joe Rogan, the stand-up comedian and
former “Fear Factor” host turned provocative podcaster. In the other stood Neil Young, the
multi-Grammy-winning rock legend with a lifelong passion for progressive
causes. The battle lasted two days, and
Rogan won without making a peep.
Young started the scuffle when he posted a letter to his
website Monday, addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label,
demanding that his music catalogue be removed from Spotify in response to “fake
information about vaccines.”
Specifically, Young cited Joe Rogan — who hosts “The Joe
Rogan Experience” podcast — and has suggested healthy, young people shouldn’t
get vaccinated. After catching the coronavirus, Rogan also praised ivermectin, a
medicine used to kill parasites in animals and humans that has no
proven anti-viral benefits. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY
that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote. “They can have Rogan or
Young. Not both.”
Two days later, without a word from Rogan, Spotify began the
process of removing the famed rocker’s music, including his best-known hits
such as “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The speed of Spotify’s decision to sideline
Young was jarring. So why did the company do it? The answer is simple: This isn’t really a
story about Rogan or Young. It’s a story about Spotify. And, despite public
perception, Spotify isn’t a music company. It’s a tech company looking to
maximize profits.
Spotify’s quest
to dominate the podcast space
The company hasn’t been shy about its desire — in 2019,
Spotify announced it was planning
to spend up to $500 million to acquire companies “in the emerging
podcast marketplace.” That year it
purchased Gimlet Media, home of podcasts such as “Reply All,” “Homecoming” and
“Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel,” for an
estimated $230 million. It also spent more than $100 million on Anchor, a platform that lets
users create and share their own podcasts.
The next year, Spotify spent nearly
$200 million to acquire the Ringer and its suite of popular podcasts,
such as “Binge Mode,” “The Press Box” and its founder’s “The Bill Simmons
Podcast.” And, of course, it reportedly spent more than $100 million to acquire
exclusive rights to a single show: the extremely popular, rabble-rousing “Joe
Rogan Experience.” “I think it comes
down to, just frankly, business,” said John Simson, the program director for
the business and entertainment program at American University. “In the music
side of things, [Spotify is] paying out roughly 70 percent of all the revenue
that comes in. It goes right back out as royalties. They’re looking for other
places where the revenue split isn’t that dramatic. … Podcasts were certainly
their go-to.”
The plan seems to be working. Spotify reportedly overtook Apple Podcasts last year to become
the largest podcast provider in the United States.
Spotify’s
strained relationship with musicians
As Spotify built its podcasting empire, it has been
increasingly criticized by the musicians who use the platform. In December,
rapper T-Pain tweeted a
breakdown of how many streams it takes for a musician to make $1 on various
services, pointing out that on Spotify it takes 315 while on Apple Music it’s
128. Several months earlier, artists and music industry workers, organized
by the Union
of Musicians and Allied Workers, protested outside Spotify offices around
the world — bringing petitions signed by more than 28,000 people that were
demanding, among other things, higher payouts for artists.
“I don’t think of any of these platforms as being music
companies that actually care about music. I think of them like technology
companies,” said Gabriel Teodros, a Seattle-based hip-hop artist who wrote a
viral Substack blog in December titled “There’s
no money in streaming.” Even so,
Teodros said he was surprised at the “swiftness” with which Spotify decided to
remove Young’s music, rather than Rogan’s podcast. “I thought it might be a
long, drawn-out thing.”
Other big-name artists have also feuded with Spotify —
Taylor Swift pulled her music from the platform until it met her demands — but
none seemed to spark widespread change. That leaves Teodros wondering if
Young’s protest is “going to be a moment where public perception of public
streaming platforms are forever altered, or is it just a blip?”
Young has received an outpouring of support from across the
political and social spectrum: “I’m with #NeilYoung,” tweeted Geraldo
Rivera. “Waiting on all the musicians to step up and back Neil Young. Where are
you?” tweeted author
Don Winslow. It’s not that dropping
Young won’t inflict any pain on Spotify. Most of his music is more than 18
months old, and older tunes have become popular during the pandemic.
So it should come as no surprise that the day after Spotify
announced the removal of Young’s catalogue, SiriusXM said it would revive “Neil
Young Radio,” a channel dedicated to Young’s music and storytelling, for a
brief stint. “When you have an
opportunity to present an iconic artist still at the height of his creativity,
you don’t hesitate to do it, again,” Steve Blatter, the company’s senior vice
president and general manager of music programming, said in a pointedly cheeky statement.
“Outspoken, brave, and a true music icon, Neil Young is in a rare class of
artists, and we are honored to collaborate with him to create a special audio
experience for his fans.”
Young’s plea to
other musicians
“I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies
will move off the SPOTIFY platform and stop supporting SPOTIFY’s deadly
misinformation about COVID,” Young wrote on
his blog on Wednesday. Whether anyone
will follow remains to be seen. Many of the artists who could take up his
battle cry — elder statesmen of rock with large enough catalogues to hurt the
streaming service — no longer own their own music. In the past few years, Bruce Springsteen, Bob
Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Stevie Nicks, the David Bowie estate and many,
many more have sold their entire catalogues for large sums. Younger artists,
including John Legend and Ryan Tedder, have begun joining in.
In most of these cases, the artist sold both the publishing
and the recording copyrights. That means, unless they have a special clause
around how their music is used, they don’t have any power to dictate where
their tunes appear. And Simson, the American University professor, said such
clauses are rare. “The reason [these companies] are paying all that money is
that these streaming services are driving up value” of those catalogues.
In his blog post, Young wrote that removing his music from
Spotify will equate to “losing 60% of my world wide streaming income.” So while other artists — particularly his
contemporaries — rallying around the legend and pulling their music from the
platform might sound like a nice rock-and-roll idea, it’s probably not going to
happen.
Is losing one
artist enough to force Spotify to change?
Then there’s the question of how much impact a single artist
can have. The numbers look staggering. The Weeknd, an extreme outlier,
currently garners 86.6 million monthly listeners. Adele has 60 million. Drake
has about 53.6 million monthly listeners. Taylor Swift has about 54 million;
BTS has 42.3 million.
If one or two of them pulled their music, how many of
Spotify’s 172 million subscribers would actually delete their accounts? How
many of its 381 million monthly users would stop listening? “Spotify is probably counting on the inertia
aspect. Once you’re on a particular streaming platform, you’re likely to stay
there because you’ve got your playlists, you’re familiar with it,” Simson said.
“It just feels scary to all of a sudden have to move.”
And those are just the top artists. What about everyone
else? As Eve
6 frontman Max Collins sarcastically tweeted, “if
spotify doesn’t take neil young seriously i bet they’ll heed the demands of
eve6.”
Now consider that Rogan has an estimated 11 million
listeners per episode. He usually posts four to five of them each
week, and they frequently last longer than three hours. When Spotify bought Rogan’s podcast,
Stephanie Liu, an analyst with the research firm Forrester, told the
New York Times, “This is part of Spotify’s bigger bet on podcasts. Spotify is
buying not only Joe Rogan’s extensive and future content library, but also his
loyal audience.”
To retain that audience, they need Rogan. Plus — and this is
key — he’s exclusive to Spotify. Very few musical artists are. Neil Young’s
albums are on Amazon, Apple and several other services. Rogan’s library is only
on Spotify. You don’t need Spotify to listen to Young, but you do need it to
listen to Rogan.
The power of
Joe Rogan
“If podcasting is Spotify’s biggest strategic bet, then Joe
Rogan is the biggest piece of that,” said Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry
analyst and consultant at MIDiA Research. “Other podcasters might be looking at
this and wondering, ‘Is Spotify safe for what I want to say?’ ” She added that while Rogan’s audience may be
large, it’s also narrow. His audience skews young and male. He plays the role
of provocateur, beholden to no political belief system. While that obviously
appeals to his fans, it’s unlikely those who don’t agree with him are tuning
in.
“It’s a lot easier to serve a huge audience of music fans
than it is to serve a huge audience of podcast listeners. [A] music genre isn’t
a polarizing thing,” Cirisano said, adding that while people may listen to
various genres of music, they’re much less likely to listen to podcasts across
the political spectrum. Losing an artist
doesn’t necessarily mean losing all the fans of that artist. But lose Rogan,
and his listeners aren’t likely to switch to Michelle Obama’s podcast, which is
also on Spotify.
Joe
Rogan is using his wildly popular podcast to question vaccines. Experts are
fighting back.
Cirisano said this could be a “crucial moment” for Spotify,
and that Young had forced them to choose between two influential talents. She is, however, doubtful that Young’s move will
persuade many people to quit Spotify. “I
think it takes a lot for people to switch platforms,” Cirisano said. “I’m not
sure if anyone aside from the top 1 percent of Neil Young stans are going to do
that.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/01/28/spotify-joe-rogan-neil-young/
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