Although Spotify will try to have its cake and eat it too as it bows to the mob’s demands, the music and podcast streaming giant ultimately will not cower to its ultimate request and completely cancel Joe Rogan’s request for one simple reason: it cannot afford to.
Sure, there’s the explicit financial calculation. For starters, Spotify paid Rogan a staggering $100 million for the exclusive rights not just to his new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience but also the entirety of its decade-plus back-catalog. Given the millions of listens per episode Rogan’s shows scored on YouTube alone before the exclusivity deal, the price of paying out Rogan’s contract without aggregating the potential billions of more views would be prohibitively expensive.
But outright ousting Rogan would open Pandora’s box in a way that would threaten the viability of Spotify’s entire business model. Namely, it would turn the streamer into a moral arbiter of the content creators off of whom it profits — and whom it pays.
Let’s take the most histrionic and overstated allegation levied against Rogan at face value and believe that he has somehow endorsed “misinformation” about the coronavirus vaccines by allowing open conversations which at least, as always, involve at least some pushback or further inquiry from him.
Now, ask yourself — is that worse than child molestation and sex trafficking? What about openly celebrating said rape of minors? Because people who have done all of those things are being platformed by and profiting from Spotify to this day. The music of artists convicted and charged with various sexual abuse charges against minors, such as R Kelly and XXXTentacion, remain on the platform and, thus, generate royalties. There are too many musicians guilty of slightly lesser criminal offenses to count.
Criminal violence is also glorified and encouraged in songs touted by Spotify. Here’s a fun little bit from “Hey Mister Mister” about beating up a woman, which Spotify curated on its playlist for rapper Kool G Rap: “Bitch why you lying, bitch you’ve been cheating / Now I got to give your motherf****** ass a beating / I punched her in the rib cage and kicked her in the stomach / Take off all my motherf****** jewelry, bitch running / I stomped her and I kicked her and I punched her in the face.”
Too Much Trouble, the balladeers of the unambiguously pro-rape track “Take the P****,” also scored their own radio playlist curated by the streamer. “Dead Body Disposal,” which, as the title suggests, instructs listeners how to most effectively dispose of dead bodies, also appears on a playlist curated by Spotify. (The artist in question, the aptly named Necro, advises that you use pepper spray to coat the smell of the dismembered pieces of corpses and take care to use “heavy-duty brawn saws that cut through gendleums like pendulums.”)
And if you really do think challenging the contemporary orthodoxy on vaccine science is more actively harmful than cheering on beating and raping women or murder, Spotify already platforms unambiguous anti-vaxxers. Spotify hosts the eponymous podcast by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is perhaps singularly most responsible for mainstreaming the lie that the life-saving MMR vaccine causes autism. By contrast, Rogan was hosting conversations with doctors adamantly debunking such conspiratorial nonsense long before the coronavirus even came into (known) existence. In fact, the American Medical Association specifically lauded Rogan’s show for his 2019 episode with Dr. Peter Hotez pushing back on actual anti-vax falsehoods.
Rogan is by no means an anti-vaxxer — unless that’s limited to the specific and misleading definition of “skeptical of the necessity of the coronavirus vaccine for healthy young people.” So does Spotify really want to answer why they would consider him beyond the pale but rapists and lunatics totally fair game?
They don’t. And between that and their investment in Rogan, he owns their company’s game, even if they are not committed in the slightest to liberalism or open discourse.
