![]() ![]() And when you deal in numbers with that many zeros behind the comma, companies are less apt to do what’s right for their customers or act with a modicum of integrity. The addition of Rogan’s 11 million daily listeners means serious coin for Spotify. At the end of 2020, Spotify reported that the JRE podcast was the #1 podcast on its platform in 17 markets (now currently top-ranking in 90 markets), solidifying their $100 million investment in an exclusive multi-year licensing deal with the JRE. So where does Spotify stand in the middle of this anti-vaccine, racist, sexist mess? Right where you’d think they would: on the side of profits over people. This doesn’t even take into account his tendency for ableist, sexist, language and propensity for entertaining far-right guests. To deliberately use this language, and to do so multiple times, is not only racially insensitive and inflammatory, but also gives others permission to do so by virtue of his position as a heralded public figure. What’s important to consider here is that there is never an acceptable context whereupon a white person can fully utilize language that has such a traumatic history. This is after Rogan issued a formal apology just days prior, where he insisted that his use of racial slurs were “ taken out of context”. This kind of language relies on racist tropes that still circulate in contemporary use (shout out to India.Arie for providing the video compilation that prompted her to pull her music from Spotify). For starters, he took to the stage just this week to mock the current controversy surrounding his commentary on Covid-19 and his gratuitous use of racial slurs, even comparing a Black neighborhood to “Planet of the Apes”. Since Rogan wants us to lean into the fact that he’s a comedian by trade, let’s examine his comedic content both on his podcast and during his stand-up routines. R&B singer India.Arie joined in at the end of January to follow Young’s lead, but stated that she was making her decision because of Rogan’s highly problematic statements on race, not just his perpetuation of Covid-19 misinformation. The backlash against Spotify started to grow as other singers and content creators started to also remove their music from the platform. ![]() Not both.” Spotify acknowledged Young’s letter and started to remove his music. The controversy intensified when singer Neil Young took a stand, asking Spotify to remove his music from the platform because it was “spreading fake information about vaccines… can have Rogan or Young. Malone reinforce current anxieties around vaccine hesitancy, Rogan offered his version of medical authority on a topic that has real life-or-death consequences to his audience of 11 million daily listeners. They cited that the average Joe Rogan Experience (‘JRE’) podcast listener is 24 years old and data shows that unvaccinated 12-34 year-olds are 5 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID than those who are fully vaccinated. As a result, in January 2022, 270 US medical professionals wrote an open letter to Spotify, calling for the platform to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform”. The pair discussed conspiracy theories about the pandemic for over three hours, even comparing the current Covid-19 vaccine to Nazi medical experiments, among other baseless conjectures. Robert Malone (who was permanently banned from Twitter the day before) on the show. At the very end of 2021, Rogan hosted virologist and vaccine skeptic Dr. The controversy over Rogan’s podcast The Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify started with his spread of Covid-19 misinformation. Which then begs the question, why has he been addressing an issue as serious as Covid-19 (which has taken the lives of close to 1 million Americans to date) on his podcast at all, if we are to assume that what he says is pure comedy? The answer is quite simple: it’s not intended for comedic relief. The whole Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy that has recently erupted evokes a similar such sentiment to me because, according to Rogan, we really shouldn’t be taking him seriously in the first place. The character of Regan tells her sister Goneril that “jesters do oft prove prophets” as they argue over the affections of Edmund, a man they are both romantically interested in – solid medieval drama!). ![]() Have you ever heard the saying, “many a truth hath been spoken in jest”? Or, more simply put, “there is truth in folly” – which essentially means that there are often nuances of truth found in comedy (apparently this quote comes from William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
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