Crosby, Stills & Nash Join Young In Requesting Their Music Be Pulled From Spotify

Though few musical relationships are as famously fraught as the one between David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, the aging icons have finally found something to agree on. On Wednesday, Young’s former CSNY bandmates joined his battle against Spotify, asking that their individual and group recordings be removed from the platform.

“We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast,” Crosby, Stills, and Nash wrote in a note shared to their respective social media pages. “While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences. Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music — or the music we made together — to be on the same platform.”

This continues the public fallout between a growing number of musicians and the streaming platform for its dissemination of The Joe Rogan Experience, the popular which has been accused by a growing number of artists and medical professionals of spreading misinformation about COVID-19. After Young removed his music from Spotify last week, fellow singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell soon followed suit. Young’s Crazy Horse bandmate Nils Lofgren also requested the removal of his music, as did singer-songwriter India.Arie.

The growing fallout over the Joe Rogan Experience prompted responses from both Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and podcast host Joe Rogan over the weekend. Ek pledged to add “content advisory” warnings to any podcasts discussing COVID, linking listeners to Spotify’s Hub of “data-driven facts, up-to-date information as shared by scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities around the world, as well as links to trusted sources.”

That same day, Rogan weighed in on the developing controversy for the first time. In a video posted to his Instagram, the actor-comedian pledged to balance out his controversial guests with more conventional ones and to also improve his pre-interview research.

“My pledge to you is I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view,” Rogan said. “I don’t want to just show the contrary opinion to what the narrative is, I want to show all kinds of opinions so we can all figure out what’s going on.”

While the removal of Young’s music from Spotify by his label Warner Brothers/Reprise Records was swift, the process has been less immediate for his former bandmates. Nash began the process of removing his music earlier this week, but Crosby indicated on Twitter that he is personally unable to remove his music from the platform. Back in March 2021, Crosby sold his recorded music and publishing rights to Irving Azoff‘s Iconic Artists Group. The deal included all of his solo works as well as his music with the Byrds, Crosby & Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. As of this publication, works by CN, CSN, CSNY, as well as solo material by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, remain available on Spotify.

In an earnings report call on Wednesday, Ek defended the company’s continued support of Rogan.

“I think the important part here is that we don’t change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else,” Ek said during the earnings call. “Our policies have been carefully written with the input from numbers of internal and external experts in this space. And I do believe they’re right for our platform. And while Joe has a massive audience — he is actually the number one podcast in more than 90 markets — he also has to abide by those policies.”