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Joe Rogan versus more than 270 scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals.

Joe Rogan versus Neil Young.

Joe Rogan versus Joni Mitchell.

And so it goes.

Anyway, for those playing catch-up, a number of musicians have pulled their music from Spotify, with Young saying Rogan’s podcast spreads “life-threatening Covid misinformation”.

In 2020, Spotify paid Rogan $100 million to host his podcast in an exclusive deal so at this point they’re pretty much all in.

As more artists threatened to pull their music, Spotify responded and said it “would begin adding content advisories to podcasts about the coronavirus”.

Over the past 30 days, which is going further back than the Rogan drama, Spotify’s share price has seen a steady decline:

On Wednesday, the company announced its fourth-quarter results (Q4) and CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek addressed the elephant in the room for the first time.

Over to The New York Times:

[Ek] said that the company’s expectations of premium users in the current quarter did not anticipate “churn” caused by the controversy over “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

“In general, what I would say is, it’s too early to know what the impact may be,” Ek said in the call. “And usually when we’ve had controversies in the past, those are measured in months and not days. But I feel good about where we are in relation to that and obviously top line trends looks very healthy still.”

Ek also said the company doesn’t “change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else”.

Rather, the policies rely on “the input from numbers of internal and external experts in this space”.

Aside from the COVID-19 misinformation angle, other artists have pulled their music from Spotify because of Rogan’s past comments on race.

This is just a little snapshot:

Joe Rogan on hoping to see Planet of the Apes in a “good neighborhood:”

“We walked in to Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa, dude. We walked in the door and there was no white people.” pic.twitter.com/ENU1XehIzn

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) January 30, 2022

You don’t have to defend everything he says and does, Joe Rogan fans.

According to The Verge, Ek did get some pushback from employees during a Wednesday meeting at the company’s new Los Angeles headquarters:

They questioned whether the platform rules are stringent enough, if the company’s latest actions did enough to address the scientific community’s concerns, and how employees’ work to advance diversity within the company can reckon with some Rogan comments…

“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” [Ek] says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”

Despite that 30-day drop in share price, Spotify did have a pretty strong showing in Q4 2021.

The company reported year-over-year growth, reaching 406 total million monthly users, of which 180 million are paid subscribers.

[sources:nytimes&verge]