| Thank you WARNER BROTHERS for standing with me and taking the hit—losing 60% of my world wide streaming income in the name of Truth. |
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 | | Gunna at the Masquerade, Atlanta, Jan. 15, 2022. | | (Prince Williams/WireImage/Getty Images) | | |
| quote of the day |
| "Thank you WARNER BROTHERS for standing with me and taking the hit—losing 60% of my world wide streaming income in the name of Truth." | | - Neil Young | |
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| rantnrave:// |
During the Gold Rush
As a pure business decision, I can hardly think of an easier one for a tech giant like SPOTIFY to make. "They can have ROGAN or YOUNG," they were told. "Not both." They picked Rogan. They picked the wildly popular podcaster with the $100 million-plus exclusive deal and the desirable demo over the cranky 76-year-old classic rocker whose last gold album is nearly two decades behind him (his average fan probably couldn't name it) and who hasn't been in Billboard's Hot 100 since 1982. They picked what CEO DANIEL EK likes to say is the free speech of creators—and, apparently, the freedom of other creators to walk out.
But.
I can hardly think of a clearer acknowledgment of what Spotify is, and is not, in 2022. Because the bottom line is that a company built on the blood, sweat and copyrights of musicians had to choose between one of rock's most revered artists and a comedian who runs at the mouth and recommends dietary supplements to his listeners, and it didn't choose the artist.
Let that sink in.
Something like this became inevitable the moment Spotify pivoted away from music as its core product and toward podcasting. You could argue that Neil Young put the company in a terrible position by forcing it to choose between him, the maker of AFTER THE GOLD RUSH, HARVEST, TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT and RAGGED GLORY, and Joe Rogan, Spotify's $100 million baby. But maybe it was Spotify that put itself in a terrible position by investing so much of its money and so much of its business model in a talk show host who is, in his own words, "a f***ing moron. I'm not a respected source of information, even for me."
Hundreds of doctors and other experts wrote an open letter to Spotify two weeks ago accusing Rogan of irresponsibly broadcasting misinformation to a young, impressionable audience in the middle of a pandemic, and asking the company to "immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform." Young's challenge to Spotify was a direct response to that. "Lies being sold for money," he wrote Wednesday. The rock great has always had an ambivalent relationship with streaming sites in general and Spotify specifically, and he has his own (very good) subscription service for his own music, which makes it easy to imagine the math wasn't personally hard for him. If Spotify rejected his demand, which it almost certainly was going to do, no big deal. But, he wrote on Wednesday, his labels, WARNER and UNIVERSAL, and his publishing partner, HIPGNOSIS, which bought 50 percent of his songwriting catalog last year, stood to take a big hit. Spotify is responsible for 60 percent of Young's streaming plays. "A huge loss for my record company to absorb," he wrote.
But Warner, Universal and Hipgnosis stepped up to absorb it, which may or may not send a signal to other artists and labels. We'll have to see. "I sincerely hope that other artists can make a move, but I can't really expect that to happen," Young wrote in the second of two open letters posted to his own site Wednesday. "I did this because I had no choice in my heart. It is who I am."
This note's for him.
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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| prisoners of rock 'n' roll |
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 | | Billboard |
| | The 2022 Billboard Power List | | The past year's boom in music assets shaped Billboard's biggest list yet of the industry's leaders - including a tally of its top 25 executives, led by UMG chairman/CEO Sir Lucian Grainge. | | |
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 | | VAN Magazine |
| | For Better, For Worse | | By Hartmut Welscher and Jeffrey Arlo Brown | | Daniel Barenboim is chief conductor for life of the Staatskapelle Berlin. Three years after the first allegations of humiliating and bullying against the conductor, the situation at his opera house is more strained than ever. | | |
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 | | The New York Times |
| | Sweden's Songwriters Look to K-Pop | | By Alex Marshall | | Dozens of songwriters and producers in Stockholm make a living from K-pop - even if they can't speak Korean. | | |
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| | The Expanding Universe Of Anaïs Mitchell | | By Katherine Cusumano | | Anaïs Mitchell is best known as the writer behind the Broadway musical "Hadestown," a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that counts among its accolades the 2019 Tony Award for Best Musical. But before that, she was a solo musician—and in January, she'll release her first solo record of new songs in a decade. | | |
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 | | The Ringer |
| | Tupac Against the World | | By Rob Harvilla | | Breaking down the complicated life and indelible legacy of one of the most important figures hip-hop ever produced, including his megahit "California Love." | | |
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| what we're into |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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