A little bit of backstory about this situation: Neil Young, an acclaimed musician, famed for songs such as “Heart of gold” recently made headlines after announcing he would be removing his catalogue from Spotify. This comes after a long back and forth between both Spotify and Neil Young, which came as a result of one of Spotify’s top podcasters, Joe Rogan. For a long time, many have criticised Rogan for his continuous spreading of covid misinformation, and believe Spotify has actively encouraged this false information, signing him to a multi-million dollar deal for his podcast to be exclusively on Spotify.
Now, many were quick to take Young’s side, which piqued my interest in this situation, as it surprised me how quick people turned against Spotify. When looking deeper into it, I found a dark truth about Spotify, especially in the way they treat their lesser-known and underground artists.
Spotify has had a long history of “shady” business practices, for example, the way they treat bigger/signed artists who have the resources to pay Spotify to promote their music endlessly through pop up ads and putting said artist songs in many of their popular playlists. A popular example of this was Drake a few years ago when he dropped the LP “Scorpion”. It was almost ruthlessly promoted by Spotify, appearing in playlists that weren’t even the same genre as Scorpion.
This overall connects to a larger issue which, in my humble opinion, shouldn’t even exist is streaming as what Spotify is doing is a legal version of payola. Payola, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is the illegal practice of when an artist pays radio stations to play their songs, without the radio station disclosing said payment. This is illegal as US law requires radio stations to disclose songs they were paid to play on the air as sponsored airtime.
In conclusion, when looking back at the Neil Young controversy this larger issue (although may not be felt by the general public, but that has been overly protested by many in the music industry, as well as fans and enthusiasts alike) can be seen with the way they’re treating the larger “artist”. It was inevitable that Spotify wasn’t going to remove Joe Rogan from their service as he is one of their top earners. He is the bigger artist and brings in a much larger revenue than Neil Young. And this connects to how independent will never be able to match against the “most listened artists” of Spotify. Even if they were to remove all their music from Spotify like Neil Young (of course for totally different reasons) their impact might not be felt at all, which is a quite sad reality for those wishing to make it in the music industry.
Sources:
https://spinditty.com/industry/why-so-many-artists-hate-spotify
EAC PRESS 