David Crosby Speaks Out About Spotify—”We Support Neil”; Spotify’s Paltry Payout System Takes Center Stage

David Crosby has spoken out about Spotify and its misinformation problems.

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Posting on Twitter on Wednesday (February 2), the artist wrote, “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences.

“Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music—or the music we made together—to be on the same platform. David Crosby, Stephen Stills & Graham Nash”

Crosby, of course, along with Graham Nash, who also recently took his music off Spotify, were in the famed rock group, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

In the last week, Young announced he was giving Spotify, the popular streaming platform that hosts Joe Rogan’s podcast, an ultimatum: Spotify could have his music or Rogan’s podcast. Not both.

Two days later, Spotify removed Young’s music and kept Rogan.

In the wake of that decision, other artists like Joni Mitchell, India.Arie, Nils Lofgren and more have also removed their work from Spotify.

The news has sparked a great deal of debate, which has bled into more conversations about Spotify’s practices in terms of information (or misinformation) spreading, as well as how much it pays artists.

Sam Boyd, the show-runner for the popular HBO show Love Life, had a tweet go viral on Wednesday posing the question: how does Spotify have so much money for podcasts and so little for musicians? To wit, Rogan was paid $100 million by Spotify for its exclusive right to host the show, while it pays a fraction of a penny to artists for a song stream.

Boyd wrote: “Why does @Spotify have so much money to pay podcasters and so little money to pay musicians?”

Twitter user, Chris Yow, pointed out the eyebrow-raising numbers that Spotify and other streaming platforms offer their audience. Yow points out that it takes 1 million streams on Spotify to make $4,370—which seems absurd to many.

It’s something singer T-Pain also wrote about recently in another viral tweet, which you can also see below.

And as each day passes, it’s likely more and more artists will drop from the platform. This news and other outside factors have contributed to Spotify losing big numbers in stocks and has also led to artists like Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo releasing his own streaming platform, Weezify.

Per Chris Yow’s Tweet:
“Per 1 million streams
TIDAL= $12,840
APPLE = $7,830
SPOTIFY= $4,370
AMAZON = $4,020
And tht is likely to be split.

Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

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