DISTURBED frontman David Draiman has praised Spotify‘s announcement that it is in the process of removing Neil Young‘s music just days after Young demanded that his catalog be removed in response to “fake information about vaccines” on the platform.
Young said the music and podcast platform is “spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe this disinformation spread by them.” “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote in a now-deleted post on his web site. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE [‘The Joe Rogan Experience’] which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” Young continued.
“Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”
Yesterday (January 26), a Spotify spokesperson issued a statement saying: “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil‘s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”
A short time later, Draiman shared his thoughts on Spotify’s decision, tagging the company’s chief executive Daniel Ek on Twitter and writing: “@eldsjal I applaud you and @Spotify for making the RIGHT call, preserving #FreeSpeech and not capitulating to the mob. I may not agree with everything @joerogan or his guests say, but they’re entitled to have the forum to say it.”
