Spotify to remove Neil Young’s music over vaccine “misinformation” protest

nme.com:

Spotify will remove Neil Young’s music from its platform following the musician’s calls for it to do so earlier this week.On Monday (January 24), Young published an open letter – which has since been deleted – expressing his feelings about content like the Joe Rogan Experience podcast “spreading false information about vaccines”.“They can have Rogan or Young.

Not both,” the musician wrote. “With an estimated 11million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence.

Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”Spotify has now responded confirming that it will do as Young has requested. “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” it said in a statement sent to Billboard.“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.