What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair
The content-moderation wars have come to audio
WHEN NEIL YOUNG and Joni Mitchell saw an injustice, they used to attack it by writing protest songs, taking on racism in the “Southern Man” and the Vietnam war in “The Fiddle and the Drum”. Today, the two musicians prefer to speak out by pressing the mute button. The pair have withdrawn their recordings from Spotify, the world’s biggest music streamer, in protest at “The Joe Rogan Experience”, a podcast that gave airtime to anti-vaxxers. Spotify has decided to hang on to its podcaster.
Mr Rogan is a bigmouth and he has been wrong about covid-19 and probably much else. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify says, the company’s own content rules. As a matter of principle, Mr Rogan should be free to speak. As a commercial question, Spotify has made a publisher’s gamble that his popular show will attract more customers than it repels. The fact that share prices in Spotify and other platforms such as Meta, the parent of Facebook, are tumbling because of slowing growth underlines how that gamble is, in the most literal sense, Spotify’s business.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Free speech’s new frontier"
From the February 3rd 2022 edition
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