Oh Spotify...
31 Jan 2022
Oh Spotify, what are you doing? You’re really not making it easy for me to love you.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you wouldn’t have heard about the shit show that is Joe Rogan sharing COVID misinformation on his podcast and Spotify doing nothing about it.
Needless to say, this has caused uproar all over the Internet and it seems that people are boycotting the platform, with Neil Young being the most vocal on the matter.
Spotify’s stance
So Joe Rogan is spreading a lot of crap about COVID on his podcast, which is listened to millions of people all over the world. Not good.
But worse still, Spotify have come back and said “yeah, that’s totally cool - it’s his podcast; he can do what he likes.” That’s really not good.
After lots of pressure, Spotify have come out and said they will now show a COVID warning where applicable, which is…meh. It doesn’t really solve the problem of spreading misinformation.
Join the boycott…?
I’m not really one for bandwagons. Actually, I’m somewhat of a contrarian to be honest. So when there’s a good old bandwagon to jump on, I tend to run the other way.
Having said that, I do think the spreading of COVID misinformation is all kinds of bad. But is that Spotify’s fault? Hmmm, you could say that it is because it’s on their platform and they’re massively rewarding Joe Rogan.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the Internet gets angry at something every few months and we’re all expected to boycott whomever the target of the moment is.
Recently it was Apple for their child protection saga and now it’s Spotify’s turn to be in the limelight.
If we keep boycotting all these services, there will be none left for us to use.
I also question how many people actually do stick with their boycott. I would imagine that a fair number of people boycott, decide the service they had was more useful than not having it, so they go back. I could be wrong, however - that’s just my opinion.
Will I leave Spotify?
I’m pretty entrenched in the Apple ecosystem at this point, so have been thinking about switching my Spotify family account over to Apple Music. The fact Apple pay artists double what Spotify pay is a nice bonus too.
I’ve never gotten around to making the move though, mainly because it’s just too much hassle. I have a lot of music in my Spotify library, which I listen to all day every day.
Honestly, I’m not sure if i’ll ditch Spotify or not. I don’t agree with their position on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think they’ve done enough to solve the problem. But I do get a shit tonne of positive usage out of Spotify.
If I do move to Apple Music, it will be because of their ecosystem, the fact there is more music available and that they pay artists more than Spotify. Not because of Joe bloody Rogan.
But Kev, you could download all your music and have it locally!
Yes, I absolutely could, dear reader. And there seems to be a lot of people doing that. But let’s be honest here, the vast majority of people doing this are pirating the music. Despite what they might say on social media, I’d be willing to bet my house that most are torrenting the majority of their library, not buying it.
How is that any better than Spotify? I’d much rather support artists and get a great service in return, than pirate a tonne of music just so I can jump on my social media sandbox and scream about how much more holier than thou I am. Just because I don’t use Spotify.
I’ve since discovered that migrating to Apple Music is very easy so I’ve since made the switch.