Radar Online
Spotify has reportedly removed upwards of 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast from their streaming service, but of the dozens of episodes removed, not one includes the episode that started the controversy over the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on the platform.
According to Gizmodo, Spotify removed 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience from their streaming platform Friday, although the most recent episode to be deleted is dated December 2018 – more than one year before the Covid-19 pandemic even started.
One of the first people to recognize that some of the podcast series had been removed was Michael Malice, a Ukrainian-American author and fellow podcaster who was a guest on Rogan’s show two times in the past.
“Spotify has deleted two of my @joerogan appearances,” he wrote Friday, including a screenshot of the two episodes – #963 and #1197 – and a message indicating they were both removed from the platform on February 4.
As Radar previously reported, this latest removal of 70 episodes of Rogan’s podcast comes in the wake of musicians – such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash – demanding their music be taken off the streaming service giant’s platform over the harmful and dangerous spread of misinformation regarding Covid-19 on the host’s show.
“They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” the Heart of Gold singer wrote in an open letter after calling out Rogan for his “spread of misinformation” by having Dr. Robert Malone, who compared the United States and their vaccine mandate to that of Nazi Germany, as a guest on his show.
“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, The Joe Rogan Experience, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” Young continued.
Young ultimately removed his content from the platform days later, while Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and a slew of other musicians subsequently followed suit.
But the removal of 70 episodes of Rogan’s show also came just one day after singer India Arie demanded her content be removed due to Rogan’s history using the N-word.
“We have this person who is offensive to a lot of people and is paid $100 million,” Arie said in a video directed to Spotify on Thursday. “The backbone of Spotify is the music. You pay the musicians .003 to .005 percent of a penny and take this money generated over here and use it to invest in this guy?”
“Do what you want, but take me off. Or pay me too. I mean us. Pay artists like me too. Pay podcasters of color too,” she added.
Rogan eventually responded to Arie’s video two days later, admitting that “It looks f—ing horrible. Even to me.”
“Instead of saying ‘the N-word,’ I would just say the word,” Rogan said in his own video Saturday, claiming the videos of him using the derogatory word were taken out of context. “I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.”
