At the start of Joe’s $100 million deal with Spotify they quietly removed “a few episodes”...

Alex Jones of InfoWars (far-right conspiracy monger)

Gavin McInnes (Proud Boys founder)

Milo Yiannopoulos (ex-Breitbart News editor)

Charles C. Johnson, who’s been described as a ‘race-baiting troll’

Owen Benjamin (alt-right political commentator/comedian)

Stefan Molyneux, who “amplifies ‘scientific racism’ eugenics and white supremacism” per the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Carl Benjamin (anti-feminist personality).

Heres the full list of deleted episodes (it is more than “a few”). So this shows us that Spotify knew full well how problematic Joe’s show is, but they figured they could just sweep all the worst parts under the carpet because $$$.

The covid misinformation: heres a summary of those claims fact checked via the BBC.

Joe has published his thoughts on all this here “its just a conversation, we need to hear both sides” but he also clumsily revealed that he has no idea who Joni Mitchell is.

Now Neil Young - some people have complained “Neil is only kicking up this fuss because he has his own streaming service” - It is true that Neil started a project with the Pono hardware player and then pivoted into a streaming service which nets him $600,000 per year, so his protest may be partly self serving, but whatever you think of Neil doesn’t mean he is wrong on this issue - just that he is one of the very few artists with the freedom to walk away.

The vast majority of younger musicians are tied into recording contracts which mean the record company controls where their music is sold and played, and you know the record companies only care about the money.

Similarly the majority of older artists (Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner, Shakira etc) have sold all their music rights to big corporations so they also don’t have any control.

You know who does have control: You do, you can just quit!

But My Playlists!

Keeping your precious playlists is not as hard as it used to be, if you sign up for the French streaming service Deezer they have a simple import button which will bring in all your Spotify playlists, favorites etc in 10 minutes.

If you prefer to use Tidal or YouTube Music or Apple Music then tunemymusic.com can be used to import songs and playlists (the free version is limited to 500 songs, but you can just do them in multiple batches.) for iOS users there is the SongShift app.