In late January, Neil Young came across an open letter published earlier in the month from a group of scientists and healthcare professionals urging Spotify to address what they deemed false information about Covid-19 vaccines on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Soon after, Young wrote a letter titled “They Can Have Rogan or Young. Not Both” to his manager and record label, demanding Spotify to remove his music from the platform over “false information about vaccines.” Two days later, Spotify obliged.
Over the past few years, Spotify has been aggressively pushing into the podcast industry to differentiate itself from other services and to become more profitable. In 2019, Spotify’s Chief Executive, Daniel Ek, wrote a blog post illuminating the company’s transition from a typical music streaming platform to a comprehensive audio platform, expecting podcasts to play an important role. In 2020, Spotify spent over $100 million to exclusively host The Joe Rogan Experience. Since the beginning of the deal, Rogan has emphasized that he and his team maintain control over the show. Spotify does not produce or edit the show, approve guests or topics, or review the content before it goes live.
Choosing Rogan over Young was a straightforward business choice for Spotify. The Joe Rogan Experience is currently the No. 1 show on Spotify in 93 markets. The show has been crucial to making Spotify the top U.S. podcast platform by listeners. The company’s internal research suggests Rogan’s listeners are highly engaged and tend to return to Spotify to listen more, including other content beyond the show.
Initially, Young’s ultimatum did not feel like a new crisis at Spotify. Rogan’s podcast sparked tensions inside Spotify as early as September 2020 when some employees expressed concern over the podcast’s content during a town-hall meeting. These concerns related to material they felt was anti-transgender. However, the controversy finally crossed into the mainstream when other artists and podcasters followed Young’s lead. Even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who have an exclusive multiyear podcast deal with Spotify, issued a statement expressing concerns over misinformation tied to the COVID-19 on the platform. Attempting to address the issue before it snowballed, Rogan posted a conciliatory video, pledging to be more careful in how information is presented on his show. Spotify promised to begin tagging COVID-19 related content with an advisory pointing users to a health-and-science information hub.
The crisis escalated after a compilation video emerged of Rogan using a racial slur in previous episodes over 12 years of his podcast. Joe Rogan apologized, but many commentators found the apology insufficient. According to Mr. Ek, Spotify spoke with Rogan about the content in his show, “including his history of using some racially insensitive language,” and Rogan “chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify.” As of February 4, Spotify removed more than 100 episodes from its platform. Even so, Mr. Ek insisted that he did not believe that silencing Rogan was the answer, and he stood by Spotify’s gamble that Rogan’s show would attract more listeners than it’d repel.
Ultimately, the ongoing controversy points to a trickier emerging problem: whether audio platforms like Spotify are beginning to look like social media, but without the content control. Just like Facebook and YouTube, Spotify started as a tech platform indifferent to what it hosted. However, as its business strategy shifts, Spotify is now moving toward being a media company responsible for what it distributes, and is inevitably confronting difficult decisions about content that can spark heated reactions from listeners, employees, artists and podcasters. Today, Spotify hosts about 3.2 million podcasts, and the vast majority of which are created by amateurs who upload their contents to Spotify as easily as they would to a social network. With RSS feeds, once a podcast has been produced, it appears immediately on platforms when searched.
Spotify, a 16-year-old company, published its “platform rules” only after the Rogan controversy exploded. Even Mr. Ek acknowledged that the company has not been transparent around the policies that guide its content more broadly. As a result, the Rogan Crisis spurred Spotify into a content moderation frenzy because there were not any bright line rules in place. In recent weeks, Spotify deleted 20,000 other podcast episodes over Covid misinformation. This reveals that Spotify has extreme discretionary power over amateur podcast hosts who don’t have the same kind of social capital as Rogan. All too often, the viewpoints of many historically excluded groups, such as BLM activists, LGBTQ+ communities, and religious minorities, are at risk of over-enforcement, but the censorship may go unnoticed because those podcasts are so small. Furthermore, this arbitrary content moderation poses risks that may having a chilling effect, resulting in more careful deliberations by podcast hosts and guests, and ultimately steering creators clear of controversial, yet important, topics.
Audio platforms have been a massive blind-spot under the content-moderation radar. Moderation task for audio poses more challenges than for text, images, or video. Spoken word content can be analyzed with actual human ears or using natural language processing techniques, but it is often prohibitively expensive to transcribe huge amount of content. Even if the audio is transcribed, it will still be challenging for an automated system to understand the nuance of the content and draw the line between someone’s opinion versus spreading misinformation. From an infrastructure perspective, the nature of the RSS feed, which is open-sourced and accessible by design, represents a significant hurdle for content moderation.
Ready or not, as Spotify opens its gates to more user-generated content, the same old free-speech battles are coming to audio. Just as Mr. Ek pointed out in an memo to Spotify employees, Spotify “should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.” For Spotify, these kinds of disputes will be ongoing and inevitable. Perhaps the best thing it could do now is to get its rules straight, so the public knows what circumstances, processes, and remedies are available when content is modified or deleted.