Joni Mitchell removes music from Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan’s podcast

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell both decided to remove their music from the streaming service because of Joe Rogan's show.

I have decided to remove my music from the streaming service. I support Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.

Dozens of medical and scientific professionals signed an open letter to Spotify in January. It urges the platform to establish a misinformation policy to address the false claims made by the Joe Rogan Experience.

Earlier this week, Young gave an ultimatum: keep his music or Rogan's. In line with Young's wishes, the platform pulled all of Rogan's music. After getting his music removed, Young criticized the service for not offering lossless audio, an option that both Amazon and Apple Music provide. Apple has been using Young's departure from Spotify as an opportunity to take a jab at its competitor, going so far as to label Apple Music as the home of Neil Young.

In 2020, the Joe Rogan Experience was made exclusive to the platform, and it has since come under fire for Rogan's potentially misleading comments about COVID-19 and its vaccines. The platform's content policies prevent it from doing anything about Rogan's show. According to internal guidelines seen by The Verge, it seems that it is possible to state that the vaccines can cause death, but not that they are designed to cause death. There are many controversial episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience that have been reviewed by Spotify, but none of them meet the threshold for removal.

The company didn't immediately reply to The Verge's request for comment.