Angelo Carusone, Media Matters president, joins Cheddar News to discuss the recent controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Spotify.

Between Bells

Joe Rogan Responds to Controversy as Spotify Adds Covid-19 Disclaimer

Welcome back everyone to Between Bells. I'm Chloe Aiello here at headquarters in new york. One story we've been following closely today. Spotify was given an ultimatum, keep joe Rogan or lose Neil Young and the streaming giant chose Rogan. Since then, Young has caused a ripple effect. Singer Joni Mitchell as well as Bruce Springsteen, guitarist Neil Lofgren joined in the protest against Spotify, Former Royals, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle also addressed the controversy early on Sunday, expressing their concern. The couple announced in 2020 that they would produce and host podcasts exclusively on Spotify. These creators accusing Rogan and Spotify of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines. And joining us now to discuss is media matters President Angelo Carusone, Angela, welcome to the show. According to date book, Spotify actually lost $4 billion dollars in market value last week after Neil Young called out the company how significant and damaging is this move by Spotify to side with Rogan here. I think what's more, I think what is significant is and the and what's causing the damage is not just their decision to make this sort of, their siding with Rogan, but it's actually a reflection of the fact that they have a pretty big business problem, which is they didn't get on the plan. They haven't thought about how they're gonna deal with this. Um, they never addressed and have put in place any countermeasures for Covid disinformation or other extremists, Let's keep that in mind here. There's a whole range of other content that was being flagged as well. That was directly targeting individuals that was considered to be extremely harmful, that they haven't actually addressed as also what you're actually seeing here is a symptom of an underlying cause that, you know, they are a provider yet they never put in place any best practices or policies, which means that it's not just this one controversy. But if you're a business investor or a stockholder, what you're really thinking about is the next and what you're likely to see until Spotify actually gets a handle on this is a series of these flash points. And I think that's ultimately why it's a business problem for that. You know, speaking of that business model according to the verge, Spotify specifically licensing his show with the goal of both converting listeners and also making money through ad sales. So can Spotify actually afford to lose Rogan even if it ruins its reputation. No, they can't now because they actually put, they bet they made a big bet on Rogan and their big bet on Rogan's that he was gonna, like you said, bring up via funnel, bring in some new audience and some new subscribers and that they would then be able to commercialize and monetize his already existing large audience with additional advertising revenues. So they made a business bet and now they're sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place because any attempts they make, uh, now to mitigate what is a pretty big cauldron of disinformation and extremism from robots program, um, is gonna lead to backlash either. He's going to ignore it and they're not gonna be able to hold him fully accountable without experiencing major consequences. Or he's gonna modulate his program a little bit in which case he's gonna dilute his own relationship and engagement with his audiences. And this is not a prediction. This is a not a new phenomenon. We've seen this in talk radio, we've seen this with other extremist programs like some of the hosts on Fox News, they all fall prey to this same sort of scenario where they're stuck between a rock and a hard place and and now they really are. Now speaking of mitigation measures. Spotify. Now, working to add a content advisory to any podcast that include discussion about COVID-19 and vaccines. Would this be enough to redeem the platform among those listeners who do you side with young and Mitchell here? No, because they're the label that they're applying does not indicate that the program you're listening to is coming from a more valid source or less valid source or contains, you know, some wacky uninformed conspiracy theories or dangerous medical misinformation is a universal label. They're applying it to anything that mentions Covid. So you could be the greatest medical expert in the country giving actual medical information about this a venerated scientists and you would have the same label that joe Rogan would get, that doesn't make much sense. Um, who is joe Rogan who admits that he doesn't know anything about this shouldn't get the same label. So that is a little bit of window dressing, and I think, you know, that sort of announced that they made about this label came at the same time, that they published not new rules, but long standing rules. And I think this gets back to uh part of our discussion earlier, which is that they've already had a lot of these rules in place. Um what they released on sunday, you know, the label was the only new thing. Everything else was actually their longstanding existing internal policies, um and they hadn't been enforcing it at all against the Oakland, which is I think partly why it led to this flashpoint, but if they haven't taken any action yet, I'm not entirely sure why just publishing on a blog post is gonna suddenly amount to them taking any action. So I don't think the label is going to be effective. I don't think it actually solves the underlying problem here. And in fact, I think they're just making it worse themselves. I want to talk about the artist's perspective here, because I know that Young came out and subsequently said many of you disparaging comments about the sound quality on Spotify. So, do you anticipate Young Mitchell or Lofgren putting their music back onto the platform at some point, you know, I'm not sure, and I actually think that, you know, if your Spotify, one of the big concerns you have with this artist management is that you don't want to give your creators an excuse to walk and Spotify already is in trouble in terms of a competition perspective because they pay terrible rates. Um, they don't pay the songwriters royalties in the same way that other streaming providers do or radio providers do. Um, their rates for actual creators is really low compared to other competitors like title, which pays way more per stream than Spotify does. In fact, Spotify has, if not the lowest among the lowest uh, residuals payments here. So, you know, you could give a creator a good excuse to walk away, take a stand, make it seem like you're doing something good and in fact are, but at the end of the day, a lot of this is money motivating. Why should joe Rogan get $100 million from Spotify to be a source of disinformation and lies and inflaming the existing pandemic that we're living in when these other song creators, the foundation of what Spotify actually is are actually getting, you know, kind of ripped off compared to other competitors. And I think that is the perspective of the creators here. I don't understand why we are getting squeezed and joe Rogan is getting essentially a blank check. Such an interesting story that we're gonna have to continue to follow. Angela, thank you so much for your insight there, That's media matters President Angelo Carusone