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“Neil Young opened a door that I must walk through.” Now Crosby, Stills & Nash are trying to follow as a group – presumably for their albums both with and without Young - although it’s unclear if they have the rights to do so. (It wasn’t Barry Manilow.) Then, on Tuesday, Indie Arie said she wanted to pull her recordings from Spotify as well, for Joe Rogan’s “language about race,” she said. Joni Mitchell pulled her music, followed by Nils Lofgren, then Graham Nash, and fans started to wonder who would be next. And for all the consumers who tweet about canceling their subscriptions to Spotify, how many really mean it, let alone follow through? Would this movement get any more traction than Pono? The hot take on Spotify is that the company depends more on Rogan, whose deal with the service is said to be worth more than $100 million, and increasingly on podcasts in general, partly because it can acquire rights for a fixed cost, instead of paying royalties that go up as more music is streamed. Young is now presenting his archives on a purposely old-fashioned website billed as “the cutting edge of filing-cabinet technology,” and one of my colleagues just reminded me that journalists who wanted to cover Young’s Pono high-resolution audio service used to have to send interview requests by fax. At a time when streaming is the biggest source of revenue for recorded music, and Spotify is by many measures the most important streaming service, it was a bold move from an artist who has always insisted on doing things his own way.
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More to the point, it was before Young went from idealistically old-fashioned to downright odd, at least to judge by the tone of the initial coverage, by asking that his music be taken down from Spotify, in protest of the COVID-19 misinformation presented on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. That was back before Apple Music billed itself as “the home of Neil Young.” Here's How Neil Young & Joni Mitchell Have Performed in Streaming Amid Spotify Removals