People in states where Omicron first hit are starting to see fewer cases of the virus, which is good news for people who live there. Joni Mitchell was given an award by the Kennedy Heart last year.
As Neil Younger protested against Spotify for giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, Joni Mitchell said Friday that she would remove her music from Spotify.
Mitchell, a well-known singer-songwriter who has written songs like “Huge Yellow Taxi” and “Blue,” announced on her website Friday that she was taking her music off of the streaming service. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that could kill people,” she wrote. “I stand with Neil Younger and the world’s scientists and doctors in this fight.”
Her statement adds fuel to a small but growing movement against Spotify, with only a few big artists speaking out but a lot of people commenting on social media about the service. The controversy has also raised questions about how much power artists have to control how their work is spread, and how difficult it is to have free speech on the internet.
“The Joe Rogan Experience,” Spotify’s most popular podcast, has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines. On Wednesday, Spotify took Younger’s music down two days after he wrote an open letter calling for it to be taken down as a protest against the show.
So after a group of a lot of scientists and public health experts asked Spotify to take down a show on Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease doctor, he took it down. Researchers said that this system spread “a lot of myths” about Covid-19 vaccines in a letter that was seen by the public.
Mitchell is the first main artist to watch Younger, after a few days of rumours and speculation on social media about who was going to be there.
Younger and Mitchell have a long history together. Each is a Canadian who helped start the singer-songwriter movement in Southern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
On Spotify, Mitchell has 3.7 million people who listen to her music every month. Two of her songs, “Huge Yellow Taxi” and “A Case of You,” have more than 100 million streams.
As of now, only a few of the show’s main artists have spoken out. Younger’s stance has resonated with a lot of people. Twitter was full of people who said they were cancelling their subscriptions, and screenshots from Spotify’s app showed a message from its customer support group saying that it was “getting a lot of calls so may be slow to respond.” Spotify has not said how many people have stopped paying for their service.
Another tech company, SiriusXM, has started a new Neil Younger channel, and Apple Music calls itself “the house of Neil Younger.”
In a statement on his web site on Friday, Younger said that he still didn’t like Rogan’s podcast and that Spotify’s sound quality was not good enough for him to listen to it. He also said that he was in favour of free speech.
Free speech is important to me. That was what it said. “I’ve never been in favour of censorship.” Similarly, I can choose not to have my music be used on a platform that spreads bad information.
