Spotify’s Ongoing Joe Rogan Problem

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The New York Times

Music Interviews, Music Commentary, Music

3.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The controversy over the star podcaster and misinformation raised thorny questions about the streaming service’s role as a platform, and exacerbated its conflicts with musicians. Guests: Ben Sisario and New York's Nick Quah.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone. It is John. I'm recording this right now Monday evening, Monday, February 7th.
0:07.4	The episode you're going to hear was recorded Friday, the 4th. And I wanted to record this
0:14.4	episode about the Rogan Spotify, Neil Young, India RE, et cetera thing, as late as possible
0:20.9	to get all the news. But this past weekend turned out to have quite a significant series of events
0:27.6	in the Rogan and Spotify tensions. So before I hand you off to three days ago, John, hosting
0:37.2	podcast, just a little bit of detail about what has happened since we taped. If you've been following
0:44.8	what's been going on between Joe Rogan and Spotify, you know that Rogan was lambasted for promoting
0:54.0	vaccine disinformation and COVID disinformation and also old clips of him using racial slur
1:00.7	have been recirculated. I will say it seems that Spotify is more concerned about the latter
1:07.3	than the former. Rogan took to Instagram this past weekend to issue a rather long spoken
1:14.0	apology and a mea culpa. He owned up to it. I guess is what you can say. And also more than 100
1:24.5	episodes, back episodes of the Joe Rogan experience have now been removed from Spotify.
1:32.0	Presumably any of those episodes that included that kind of language and also potentially if you
1:38.0	look at the list of guests, some fringier right wing provocateur figures potentially some COVID-related
1:45.9	stuff. So Spotify either did not take a close look prior to onboarding the Joe Rogan experience
1:55.9	exclusively did not take a close listen to those old episodes or had listened to them and sort of
2:02.2	hoped nobody would raise a complaint. Whichever the case there are now I believe it is 113 episodes
2:08.4	that are no longer available on Spotify. Now there are a lot of questions Daniel Eck who is the
2:15.3	head of Spotify. They had to give a town hall and release statements and he has been clear that
2:22.7	the things that Joe Rogan has been accused of and criticized for are not acceptable. He does not
2:28.9	personally find them tasteful. He does not find them consistent with Spotify's brand morality value
2:35.9	whatever that might be. That's number one. However, Spotify is a big publicly traded company.
	...

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