Facebook moment for Spotify? Joe Rogan is not the only problem after Neil Young firestorm
Spotify Chief Executive Office Daniel Ek is trying to extinguish a raging controversy that began a week ago, when singer Neil Young demanded his music be removed from the platform over concerns that its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, is spreading vaccine misinformation. The company, which has a $100 million deal with Rogan, dropped Young, prompting a social-media firestorm.
Over the weekend, Ek said Spotify would add an advisory to podcasts that discuss Covid-19 and direct listeners to a hub offering more information about the pandemic. The company also published rules on what content is and isn’t allowed on its service. But even if that puts out this particular fire, Spotify’s ambitious expansion into podcasts all but guarantees there will be more conflagrations, of varying degrees of intensity, in its future.
In a Twitter Spaces discussion, Bobby Ghosh asked fellow Bloomberg Opinion columnists Parmy Olson and Lionel Laurent to weigh in on Ek’s predicament and what lies ahead for his streaming service. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Ghosh: Lionel, you’ve described this as Spotify’s “Facebook moment.” Could you expand on that?
Laurent: Spotify wasn’t supposed to be part of the conversation about misinformation. It was the savior of music industry; it turned music streaming into a legal format with a $9.99 subscription. It was never the subject of this kind of discussion.
What changed? Spotify wanted to grow, and it couldn’t grow with music alone. It needed to get into podcasting. It showered money on all types of podcast stars, to please everyone, to be all things to all people. It started to become a media firm.
And as it got into this world, it couldn’t avoid getting sucked into what we’ve
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