January 26 - Neil Young’s entire catalog is removed from Spotify. Other artists requesting the removal of their catalogs include India Arie, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills.

January 28 - Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in removing her music from Spotify. Among these guidelines, there’s a section dedicated to disallowing content that “promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health'. January 30 - Spotify publishes its content guidelines for the first time (opens in new tab). January 31 - Rogan posts a 10-minute video to Instagram (opens in new tab) in which he defends his decision to interview guests like Dr Robert Malone and cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough, saying “I do not know if they’re right. He also says it’s too early to say whether the issue will have a negative impact on Spotify’s revenue. Arie announced that she’s removing her music from the platform.įebruary 3 - Daniel Ek addresses the Rogan controversy in an earnings call with investors (opens in new tab), saying that he’s “really proud of the steps we took following the concerns raised by the medical and scientific communities”, but admits that “we should have done it earlier”. He also pledges $100 million towards “licensing, development and marketing of music (artists and songwriters) and audio content from historically marginalized groups”.įebruary 5 - JREMissing (opens in new tab), a site that tracks the podcast, reported that 113 episodes of the Joe Rogan experience had been pulled from Spotify.įebruary 5 - Rogan posts a video to Instagram (opens in new tab) in which he apologizes for his use of racial slurs in past podcast episodes, saying that “I certainly wasn’t trying to be racist”.įebruary 4 - Singer-songwriter India Arie posted an Instagram compilation video (opens in new tab) of Rogan using the N-word 24 times in episodes of the podcast that predate his exclusivity deal with Spotify. “While I strongly condemn what Joe has said and I agree with his decision to remove past episodes from our platform, I realize some will want more.” Ek said.

February 7 - Rumble Inc., an online video platform popular among US conservatives, publicly offers Joe Rogan a $100 million deal to leave Spotify (opens in new tab).įebruary 7 - Neil Young urges Spotify workers to leave the company “before it eats up your soul”, taking aim at CEO Daniel Ek in a blog post (opens in new tab).įebruary 6 - Daniel Ek tells employees that Rogan’s use of racial slurs were “incredibly hurtful”, but that “silencing Joe is not the answer” in a memo (opens in new tab).

Should i cancel spotify