Spotify Removed Joe Rogan Episodes. It Has Strayed Far from Its Greatest Value – Barron’s

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About the author: Ian Chaffee is a technology and startup media relations consultant based in Los Angeles.

When Spotify signed a reported $100 million multiyear deal in 2020 for the privilege of exclusively streaming Joe Rogans popular podcast, it was only a matter of time before people started firing at the massive target the company put on its own back. Rogans lucrative all sides approach to booking guests and producing content made it easy.

Also unfortunately for Spotify, the controversy is tailor-made for generational division. The all-ages battle royale kicked off with Boomers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell utilizing that most 1960s form of mobilization and persuasionboycott and protestto try and get Spotify to deplatform Rogan. Rogan himself comes from Generation X. He comes off as an inquisitive and nonconfrontational, but also politically incorrect, slacker-wing personality involuntarily thrust into the role of culture warrior when he would rather be doing MMA, DMT, or some other acronymic pursuit. Powerful millennials Daniel Ek and Taylor Swift, despite pleas from all corners, have opted for nonintervention when either could end the business scandal of the day whenever they wanted. The Zoomers dont care and are scrolling through TikTok.

The pressure on Rogan and Spotify intensified last weekend over Rogans repeated use of a racial slur, along with a few other inflammatory statements that cannot simply be dismissed with the counterargument of context. If that isnt enough for Spotify to eat whatever money is needed to ditch Rogan, then surely the risk that other offensive material will be found in the archives of Rogans podcast or comedic output should be. The man was a stand-up comedian first, after all, a line of work that lends itself to easy cancellation (as witnessed by fellow tradeswoman Whoopi Goldberg).

Caught up in its ambitious and now possibly tragic goal of becoming, with apologies to pre-Rogan lightning rod Howard Stern, the king of all audio media, Spotifys biggest mistake was going all-in on podcasts and chasing a market it apparently didnt yet fully understand. It wasnt enough that Spotify changed how we listen to music, it had to change how we consume everything audio. Now it has flown a bit too close to the sun. It chased what must have seemed like an easy user acquisition play in the highly lucrative bro market at the cost of not only cultural blowback, but also neglect of its primary value proposition.

Maybe this is an opportunity for Spotify to reclaim that value proposition. Lost in this debate heated by the flame of its own dumpster fire is that no one, Spotify included, is talking about the companys killer feature, what made it so popular in the first place: leveraging the cloud and the information listeners put into that cloud to create a better and more specialized music-listening experience for its users.

Spotify effectively married the appeal of a voluminous (albeit often pirated) peer-to-peer music library like Napster with the mixtape culture that has been a part of music fandom back to the cassette. While artists may not have been uniformly thrilled with those streaming royalties, whatever Spotify offered was better than nothing, and the end result for the audience was like nothing they had experienced before. If someone wanted to listen to the music from the year 1975 and only 1975 (and not the band The 1975), boom, they could find at least 10 different playlists for precisely that curated by actual human beings, with interesting and unique choices made by those playlist curators.

It might have been tougher for those who virtue-signaled their way out of their Spotify Premium subscriptions over the last week or two if Spotify had shown the same attention to their music product in the last few years that it did to someone like Rogan. A user exodus combined with Spotifys inattention reduces the future potential of the kind of music discovery that made Spotify so special in the first place. It wont be easy for Spotify simply to play Facebooks game of Well, Where Else Are You Going to Go? Competitors like Apple Music are champing at the bit to pick up those cancelers. Spotify handed them a new bit of leverage in positioning themselves as the exciting new streaming-music frontier that can do right by both their artists and listeners.

I dont doubt that Spotify is seriously considering the gravity of this stress test for its platform, its disaffected staff, disappearing subscribers, and strong competitors who now smell blood in the water. But I do wonder if the company has put itself in the best position to make the necessary choice to continue surviving and thriving. That will require much more than just joining the Joe Rogan cancel parade.

Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barrons and MarketWatch newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit commentary proposals and other feedback toideas@barrons.com.

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Spotify Removed Joe Rogan Episodes. It Has Strayed Far from Its Greatest Value - Barron's