Neil Young railed against Spotify in a new blog post published on the Neil Young Archives. The company announced earlier this week that it was pulling Young’s music off its platform after the musician demanded Jan 24. to be removed, citing the streaming service’s distribution partnership with Joe Rogan and accusing Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” of spreading false information regarding COVID-19 and vaccines. Young stressed in his latest post that he “supports free speech” and “has never been in favor of censorship.”
“Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information,” Young writes. “I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”
Young then condemned Spotify for cutting the quality of the music it streams, adding, “Amazon, Apple Music and Qobuz deliver up to 100% of the music today and it sounds a lot better than the shitty, degraded and neutered sound of Spotify. If you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form. Business over art. Spotify plays the artists’s music at 5% of its quality and charges you like it was the real thing.”
“Switch to one of the alternatives, companies that support the arts,” Young adds. “Real sound is available there… You just have to leave Spotify and go to a place that truly cares about music quality.”
Those comments revive an argument that Young, who is famously particular about sound quality, made in 2015, when he removed his catalog from all major streaming services due to what he deemed inadequate sound quality. “I don’t need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution” he wrote in a Facebook post at the time. However, all of the services he mentions have launched high-quality audio options in the past few years; Spotify said it would debut such a plan last year but earlier this month said it is delayed indefinitely.
In his original post published after Spotify announced it was pulling his music, Young wrote, “Spotify has recently become a very damaging force via its public misinformation and lies about COVID. I first learned of this problem by reading that 200-plus doctors had joined forces, taking on the dangerous life-threatening COVID falsehoods found in Spotify programming. Most of the listeners hearing the factual, misleading and false COVID information on Spotify are 24 years old, impressionable and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth.”
For more on Young and Spotify, read PvNew features editor Chris Willman’s analysis here.
