3 minute read
Mouthpiece
Next Article
Neil Young plays hardball with Spotify
OK, so we’ve been mean on another page about the dire Sex And The City reboot, but that won’t stop us raising a glass to Sarah Jessica Parker who celebrates her birthday on the 25th. Let’s hope she’s stocked up on candles as her hubbie Matthew Broderick has his birthday four days earlier. Hopefully ain’t nobody going to forget Chaka Khan’s big day which arrives on the 23rd while fellow popsoul legend Diana Ross gets the party hats out three days later. Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, some years ago on the 27th while Johnny Knoxville was born there too on the 11th! Sounds like an unbelievable coincidence, except that the Jackass guy’s real surname is actually Clapp. You can see why he changed it. Any creative Scots with birthdays this month? Yep, Jon Fratelli (4th), James Robertson (14th), David Mach (18th), Gail Porter (23rd) and Ewan McGregor (31st, pictured right). Many happy returns to the lot of you.
Zara Janjua gives both barrels to an infl uential music and podcast platform while wondering if we will platform while wondering if we will ever be saved from James Blunt
Hello and good day to everyone. Except Spotify. I’m getting sick of big businesses refusing to take responsibility for their practices. It’s not so long since we had the same debate with social-media platforms as they morphed from hosts to publishers but claimed they were so big, the content so vast, that they could not possibly be held accountable. But they’ll take the wonga, thanks very much. It’s like being too posh to wash.
The streaming giant came under fire after concerns were raised over covid misinformation in The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It features freewheeling and often controversial conversations with a range of voices including virologist Dr Robert Malone, who made misleading claims about vaccines, prompting an open letter from 270 healthcare professionals urging Spotify to take action.
As people marked themselves ‘safe from Joe Rogan’ on Facebook, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and India Arie were among the artists calling for their music to be removed from the platform in protest. Plus, James Blunt threatened to release more music if Rogan’s podcast continued. The last couple of years have been depressing enough, for god’s sake.
Spotify barely compensates artists for music-streaming as it is, chucking them 0.003%-0.005% of peanuts. But now a new movement is forming as artists and subscribers are voting with their feet. Just as violence is a language for some, money talks in business, so hit them square in the gonads Joni (they keep them in their wallets). Now in the eye of the shitstorm, they’ve removed 110 episodes of his podcast after a compilation video of the host using racial slurs went viral. He used the absolute Voldemort of words 20 times and compared a Black neighbourhood to a Planet Of The Apes movie.
Rogan was a social-media phenomenon with 11 million YouTube subscribers. In 2020, he was signed in an exclusive deal with Spotify for $100m. That’s Spotify not just hosting him but financially endorsing his content. Every time an episode is downloaded an angel investor gets his wings. Rogan has apologised, giving a school report-card response: he’ll ‘do better’.
Rogan is a lad-next-door with down-to-earth ‘authenticity’ and wants to offer both sides of the debate. So, should he be held to the same standard as journalists? Channel 4 News rakes in roughly 800,000 viewers per show while Rogan’s podcast was downloaded 190 million times in one month. As Spider-Man reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility. We shouldn’t be legitimising ignorant dumbasses in our thirst for balance. Zara Janjua is a presenter, journalist, producer, filmmaker, writer and performer, zarajanjua.com
