Music

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Monday, January 31st, 2022.

I'm John Potthorz, the editor of Commentary with me. It's always executive editor,

A. Greenwald Hyade. Hi, John. Senior writer, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

Hi, John. An associate editor, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John.

When Spotify decided to buy Joe Rogan's podcast, at the time to Spotify,

I bought Joe Rogan's podcast. He was scoring 190 million downloads a month.

So Spotify's purchase of the Joe Rogan podcast was a straight up effort to build

audience by getting the most successful podcast in the world into its number sheet so that it could

tell Wall Street that it was making hay with its numbers. Joe Rogan has on a couple of,

I wouldn't really describe them as vaccine skeptics. One of the two leading figures in the controversy

involving Rogan is one of the guys who invented the mRNA vaccine or came up with the concept of how

to create an mRNA vaccine. So it wouldn't exactly be described as a vaccine skeptic.

He has on these two figures, of course, people don't like him because they think he's a

some kind of a right-wing intellectual dark web crank. And started campaign to say that he

is peddling misinformation. And then of course, the big news last week was that Neil Young, the

screechy voiced Canadian American 300-year-old ex-hippy, pulls his music from Spotify, followed by

fellow Canadian 300-year-old ex-hippy, Joni Mitchell. So all of Laurel Canyon back in 1971 is going to

pull it through and waiting for David Crosby, Jackson Brown, the late Graham Parsons could come back

from the dead to pull his music from Spotify. But of course, the calculus here is hilarious if you

think about it because let's say that in the course of a day, people going to Spotify want to listen

to Neil Young, you know, several thousand people listen to a Neil Young song a day. While five

...