Amazon Music subscribers soon won’t be able to stream songs from Neil Young, as the legendary singer-songwriter announced plans to leave the platform in his latest corporate boycott. This announcement follows Young’s departure from Facebook over the site’s “unconscionable” use of AI chatbots with children, and several years after he famously left Spotify over the platform’s exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, whom Young accused of spreading COVID misinformation.
In a post to his Neil Young Archives website, Young wrote (yes, in all caps), “FORGET AMAZON AND WHOLE FOODS / FORGET FACEBOOK / BUY LOCAL / BUY DIRECT / BEZOS SUPPORTS THIS GOVERNMENT / IT DOES NOT SUPPORT YOU OR ME”.
Continuing, Young wrote, in a poetic-style format,
The time is here.
FORGET AMAZON.
Soon my music will not be there.
It is easy to buy local.
Support your community.
Go to the local store.
Don’t go back to the big corporations
who have sold out America.
We all have to give up something
to save America from
the Corporate Control Age it is entering.
They need you to buy from them.
Don’t.
They shut down our government
your income
your safety
your family’s health security.
Take America Back
together, stop buying from the
big corporations
support local business.
Do the right thing. Show who you are
Young posted the missive on October 8th and, as of this publication, his music is still available to stream on Amazon Music. Additionally, physical copies of his albums are sold on Amazon. Young didn’t specify whether he would only stop digital streaming or pull his music from Amazon in all its forms.
The 79-year-old singer-songwriter previously left Spotify in 2022 over concerns that the service was giving a platform to COVID and vaccine misinformation on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. At the time, Rogan’s podcast—the most popular podcast in the world—had an exclusive streaming agreement with Spotify. Two years later, when Rogan’s exclusive Spotify deal expired, Young begrudgingly returned to “low res” Spotify since Amazon and Apple Music had also begun carrying the podcast.
“I cannot just leave Apple and Amazon, like I did Spotify, because my music would have very little streaming outlet to music lovers at all,” Young wrote in 2024, “so I have returned to Spotify, in sincere hopes that Spotify sound quality will improve and people will be able to hear and feel all the music as we made it.”
Though Young is back on Spotify, leaving the platform is once again en vogue. Artists began leaving the platform earlier this year, with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard the most prominent, in response to—among many other qualms—former Spotify CEO Daniel Ek‘s venture firm raising nearly $700 million to fund AI-powered military technology, including drones. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Deerhoof, and Xiu Xiu have left the platform as well, along with Massive Attack, who became the first major-label act to pull its music from Spotify.
Meanwhile, Spotify does appear to be responding to mounting criticism on several fronts. A week before Massive Attack’s departure last month, Spotify announced it would roll out lossless, hi-res audio streaming for premium subscribers—the lack of which Young and many others have bemoaned for years.
Two weeks later, Spotify announced several new initiatives to combat AI on the platform: an impersonation policy to protect against vocal deepfakes, a music spam filter to stop mass uploads of AI content and Spotify’s algorithm from recommending them, and proper disclosures for AI music credits. This decision came after the company faced heavy scrutiny this summer for promoting an AI-generated band, The Velvet Sundown, and allowing the non-existent group to garner over a million streams within weeks.
