Read Neil Young’s open letter to Spotify on Joe Rogan’s podcast

Canadian-American singer Neil Young’s music will be removed from Spotify at his request, following his protest over Joe Rogan spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine on his popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Spotify said that it regretted Young’s decision, “but hope to welcome him back soon.” It was, however, not clear when his music will actually be taken down.

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On Monday, the 77-year-old singer wrote an open letter to his manager and label, asking them to remove his music from the Swedish audio streaming platform.

Read the open letter here. 

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform. I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE [the Joe Rogan Experience] which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”

The letter has since disappeared from view on Young’s website.

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Spotify aired the popular podcast that featured Robert Malone, who has been criticized for spreading COVID misinformation. Following this, a group of doctors and scientists spread a petition online calling on Spotify to adopt policies to prevent the spread of misinformation on their platform.

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Spotify said in a statement on Thursday that “we have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.”

With inputs from The Associated Press