Spotify's Joe Rogan-shaped Problem
Imagine Joni Mitchell beating Joe Rogan up with a chair whilst a stadium full of braying hipsters and libertarians watch on
If you log onto Apple Music today, you’ll be greeted by two new items in the carousel. One says ‘Neil Lives Here’ and the other says ‘Joni Lives Here’. They are references, of course, to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell; the two legendary artists who, in the past few days, have withdrawn their music from Apple’s rival, Spotify. Their contention is that Spotify, in funding the Joe Rogan Experience, has actively promoted and supported anti-vaxx material. Hence no-platforming the platform.
I hate to call myself prescient, but this is a newsletter called Future Proof after all. A couple of weeks ago I published a look at the state of podcasting and made the following observation: “Spotify has attempted to become an editorial publisher without creating any editorial identity. The result is a mishmash of shows that feel like they’ve been ripped from at least a dozen different places. Being the native, original and exclusive publisher of both the Joe Rogan Experience and Reply All shows, to me, that there is not a coherent strategy in place. And without that editorial coherence, that clear sense of what a Spotify podcast should look and sound like, it’s going to be very hard for them to build original brands.”
I quote myself there because Spotify now faces a possibly existential crisis (although, you know, Spotify is like a buff VC-backed cockroach in many ways) because of the fundamental tension between being a publisher and a distributor. (I’m going to write a longer piece about this in the coming days, which will be available on Medium). As a distributor, they want to be an omni-platform, serving every conceivable need; as a publisher they have to create an identity and administer their own editorial oversight.
When Spotify bought The Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 for a figure estimated at $100m their calculation was simple. Buy the most popular podcast in the world, make it a Spotify exclusive, gain users more expeditiously than any other method, profit. And to an extent that’s worked. The Joe Rogan Experience is still the world’s most popular podcast, which is about the best they could’ve hoped for with only 18 months of migrating listeners to the platform. But an inevitable problem is emerging, as Spotify is held responsible for content published under a brand that it owns. Which, let’s face it, is fair enough.
It may be that Spotify doubles-down on its commitment to Rogan and free speech, and tells Young and Mitchell and anyone else who wants to withdraw their music that they can fuck off. Spotify, after all, is not in the thrall of these people: they are the world’s biggest music streaming service, and while they’re not a cash cow for indie performers, they are for major artists and record labels (both Young and Mitchell are signed to subsidiaries of Warner Music, if that’s somehow interesting). What we might end up with is a situation not unlike the calls for boycott of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where the sheer importance of competing in a World Cup ultimately trumps the moral concerns, however much noise is generated. The baby is unlikely to be thrown out with the bathwater.
But, but, but… Spotify could blink here.
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