[The Hill] Spotify sides with Joe Rogan after Neil Young ultimatum

sure he did. I blame Rogan, you should too.

 

kind of shocking that no one has yet brought up the fact that Neil Young saved Lionel trains

in this clip he's a bit too humble about that, but note what he says at 2:00 about being a rich hippie like @Deckard

 

Neil Young himself has a song that's a @Deckard story

 

the other thing I haven't seen people speculate about . . . this is probably a not-so-cynical ploy on the part of Neil Young to sell more of his latest album Barn, which was released in December. If people are streaming it on Spotify rather than buying the album, well, the economics just aren't there.

the album:



the economics of it all (can't vouch for this source but I will trust this guy as roughly correct):

Do artists get paid a lot on Spotify compared to selling albums?

That’s an interesting question. Someone buys one of my albums on iTunes or CDBaby or Amazon, I net, after pressing the CD and shipping it to distributors, and paying royalties to the composers, about $4. If they download that album, I net maybe $7. But if someone STREAMS all 12 of those songs on Spotify, I net about 1 penny. That’s right, ONE CENT for a whole streamed album, or about 1/10th penny per stream. Sounds terrible, right?

The bigger picture? I sell about five albums a MONTH (CDs and downloads are pretty dead, unless you’re Beyoncé or Taylor Swift). Net = $20. Now for streaming: My songs are streamed on Spotify and the other streaming sites about a million times a month. At that measly 1/10th Penney, the net = $1,000. No comparison for me.

Streaming makes it possible for non-big label musicians to reach over a billion listeners. No other way to do that.
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I bet we see Neil Young return to Spotify eventually when the prairie wind dies down and the dust settles.

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Heart of Scold
Neil Young’s censorious crusade against Joe Rogan exemplifies the Left’s increasing hostility to free speech.

https://www.city-journal.org/neil-young-v-joe-rogan-and-free-speech

excerpt:

This brings us to perhaps the most surprising detail about this episode: since when did Young become the sort of person to advocate for shutting up his ideological opponents? The rock and folk artist made his name as a countercultural figure in the 1960s, raging against the cultural and political establishment, working with Crosby, Stills, & Nash to release “Ohio,” a powerful protest song released after the killing of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. The song became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam War movement. Some mainstream AM radio stations, sensitive to lyrics referring to “soldiers gunning us down,” banned it, but underground radio helped make it a hit anyway. Young continued to be a mainstay of the counterculture in the decades to come. In 2006, he reunited with Crosby, Stills, & Nash to barnstorm the country singing anti-Iraq War and anti-George W. Bush songs. They called it the “Freedom of Speech Tour” and kicked it off in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Constitution.

Young’s transformation from countercultural champion of freedom of speech to corporate censorship advocate and defender of the public-health bureaucracy didn’t occur in a vacuum. Progressives have become increasingly censorious over the past few years. A majority of Democrats now believe that both private tech companies and the U.S. government should “take steps to restrict false info online.”

Many on the left were once militant in their support for free expression, believing that misinformed, even offensive, viewpoints were as worthy of airing as any other speech. When the Yale Political Union invited segregationist politician George Wallace to speak at the university, famed civil rights activist Pauli Murray (who was attending law school there) rose to defend freedom of speech.

“This controversy affects me in a dual sense, for I am both a lawyer committed to civil rights including civil liberties and a Negro who has suffered from the evils of racial segregation,” she wrote. But she could see no justification to deny Wallace the same freedoms she wanted for all people.

“The possibility of violence is not sufficient reason in law to prevent an individual from exercising his constitutional right,” she noted. “This has been the principle behind the enforcement of the rights of the Little Rock Nine, James Meredith and others to attend desegregated schools in the face of a hostile community and threats of violence. It must operate equally in the case of Governor Wallace.”

This viewpoint bears little resemblance to that of the activists of the modern Left, who are now quick to label expressions they disapprove of as “misinformation” or “hate speech” to justify censoring it.

Young’s crusade against scientific misinformation is also ironic because he has spread it himself. The musician has long been an opponent of the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food. His 2015 song “A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop” tells us that “Yeah I want a cup of coffee but I don’t want a GMO / I like to start my day off without helping Monsanto.” When CBS host Stephen Colbert confronted Young with research showing that GMOs are fine for human consumption, the singer was dismissive. “That must be a Monsanto study!” Young told Colbert. “It didn’t notice the terrible diseases and all the things that are happening.” If simply being wrong about a scientific technology that is saving lives is justification enough for censoring someone, then shouldn’t Young himself be censored?
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more at the link