Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Came across an article in the Wall Street Journal last month headlined as:

Neil Young Will Return to Spotify After Two-Year Boycott Over Joe Rogan

Singer-songwriter says he had no choice but to return to streaming platform due to wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast

March 13, 2024 Gareth Vipers

For you non-WSJ subscribers who may have forgotten what this is all about, here’s a quote from the WSJ piece:

Young penned an open letter to his manager and label in 2022 asking them to remove his music from the platform, saying it was spreading fake information about Covid-19 vaccines through Rogan’s show.

The article explains that in fact, “…Young’s label legally has control over how and where his music is distributed…” but Vipers claims that they had reason to honor his request. The piece does not say if they actually did, and if they did not, then this would seem to have been a rather empty gesture on ol’ Neil’s part.

Anyway, the point of this piece was that Rogan had since 2022 made a very lucrative deal to have his podcast more widely streamed, including on Apple and Amazon, and in light of that, Young was going to start letting his musical recordings be distributed on Spotify again. [I am inferring from that piece of info that Warner Bros did indeed pull his stuff from Spotify in ’22.]

I am a fan of Young’s music. Hearing Cinnamon Girl blasting out of a pair of car speakers was one of the great thrills of my youth, and one of the few truly wonderful musical moments on the old Saturday Night Live show was when Young and Crazy Horse brought down the house with a searing version of Rockin’ in The Free World. The man was a serious rocker, and he wrote some great songs.

One of my favourite Neil Young moments was in 1988, when he put out an album titled This Note’s for You. It was a blast at other musicians who allow their music to be used to sell shit. One of my (admittedly costless to hold) convictions is that musicians (or actors or other performers) who have made serious money in their career and then allow their output or their selves to be used to sell shit – any shit – are putzes who I wouldn’t trust if I ever ran into them.

As one example, I was depressed a couple of years ago to hear the Who’s Eminence Front – one of their best recordings – being used to sell Nissans. From the movies we have Samuel L Jackson, Danny DeVito, Rob Lowe, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and on and on….one sees them more often in ads than in movies.

[I would like to think there is a special place in hell for celebs who accept money to promote online gambling sites – Gretzky, McDavid, Matthews, Jamie Foxx, etc. But I’m sure there’s not.]

These people are not needy. I’m an economist, I get it, no one thinks they have enough money, but I happen to think there ought to be some things one will not do for more. And no, I am not saying that celebrities or people with more wealth than some specified number should be prohibited from selling other people’s shit. They all have a perfect right to do what they are doing. I’m really only saying I think less of them for doing it –  which troubles them not the least, I know.

So back to ol’ Neil. His original move to pull his music from Spotify had two characteristics. One, it harmed Spotify – maybe. Spotify operates a subscription model in which folks pay a monthly fee for the right to listen to music from its catalog, including Young’s. So, it would appear that Young’s move hurt Spotify only to the extent to which people cancelled their Spotify plans, either out of sympathy with Young, or simply because they would no longer be able to listen to his tunes on the platform. I don’t know if that happened (though I rather doubt it), but more important to me is the second characteristic, which is that Young paid a price himself for doing that. He lost his share of that revenue, too, and about that there is no doubt. To me, that speaks to a level of integrity in Young. I don’t mean to say I agree with Young’s apparent position that Rogan is evil. I’ve never listened to one of Rogan’s podcasts, and don’t know what was said on them that upset Young. My point is only that incurring a cost yourself over a principle signals integrity. Anyone can run around bashing others, imposing costs on others, people can do that just for amusement. Taking a hit yourself says something, it says you mean it. Similarly, Young’s apparent past refusal to let his music be used to sell shit cost him real $. Someone would surely have paid him to use his music to sell cinnamon or something, back in the day.

Of course, the corollary to all this is that Neil could have reacted to the recent news of the now-wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast by asking Warner Bros to pull his music from Amazon and Apple, too. That would be even more costly to Young, and would leave me even more impressed with his integrity and commitment. What he has actually done by, according to the article, allowing his music back on Spotify (along with leaving it on the other platforms) says to this observer that Young was not willing to pay that high a price for his principles.

And, to be clear, in ‘price’ I am not pointing only to the money he would lose from streaming payments. He’s a musician, composer and performer, and having people hear his music has been his life’s work. Losing that is a serious price to pay, even were no cash involved.

I judge Neil Young not, and I still thank him for putting out the This Note’s for You album and writing and recording Cinnamon Girl. I merely point out that everything has a price, and we all have to decide which prices we will pay and which we will not, and I continue to believe that those who pay a price to adhere to a principle deserve my respect, if not necessarily my agreement. And – those who have made millions, become famous and then go on to accept money to sell other people’s shit deserve my contempt.

Btw, if I’m right that Young’s original move in 2022 cost Spotify nothing, it raises another question: what was ol ‘Neil trying to accomplish? Topic for another post, perhaps.