Neil Young Returns To 'Low Res' Spotify After 2-Year Protest

Ryan Grenoble
·2 min read
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Rock icon Neil Young is back on Spotify, but he doesn’t seem all that happy to be there.

“Spotify, the #1 streamer of low res music in the world - Spotify where you get less quality than we made, will now be home of my music again,” Young announced in a post on his website Tuesday.

The artist left the streaming platform in protest in 2022, after podcaster Joe Rogan started regularly using it to spread misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines. At the time, Spotify was the exclusive home of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Now that Rogan’s podcast is available elsewhere, Young concluded he’d either need to pull his music from all of the platforms, or else return to Spotify.

“My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at SPOTIFY,” Young explained. “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.”

He concluded with a couple of shots at Spotify’s audio quality, which at its highest setting lags far behind competitors like Apple Music, Tidal and Qobuz.

“I hope all you millions of Spotify users enjoy my songs!” Young wrote. “They will now all be there for you except for the full sound we created.”

Young took action in January 2022 after some 270 scientists, doctors, health care workers and professors signed an open letter calling on Spotify to establish a misinformation policy, denouncing Rogan as “a menace to public health.”

Artists including Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell and India Arie followed suit, with Arie also calling out Rogan’s history of racism and use of racial epithets.

Among other COVID claims, the popular podcaster falsely suggested that young and healthy people don’t need to be vaccinated ― a position he later distanced himself from, calling himself “a fucking moron” and “not a respected source of information.”

Following Young’s withdrawal from Spotify in 2022, Rogan apologized if he’d offended anybody, though his behavior remained largely unchanged. Less than a day after pledging to “have all the pertinent facts at hand” before discussing the coronavirus, he tweeted and deleted a link to a story about ivermectin ― a drug used to treat parasites in animals that former President Donald Trump falsely claimed could treat COVID.

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