However, as righteous as the support for Neil Young and his cause may seem at a first glance, the question remains first of all as to why prominent protest didn’t unleash itself over the fundamental inequalities and the lacks of transparency at work at the platform, and why the musicians did not use their voice to address those in the wake of their exit, as both Pitchfork and The New Yorker observe.

Also, already now Young and Mitchell leaving the service has generated a bigger medial echo about the crooked politics of a corporation numerous protests in the past simply and sadly couldn’t. No question about it: Young’s resolution comes as a welcome sign of artistic emancipation from questionable practices of the high tech culture industry of today and demonstrates that Spotify is indeed not indispensably a “necessary evil” for all the artists out there. United in protest: Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The times are heated up – particularly around everything circling the Corona pandemic – and the streaming service has been caught amidst the very trenches of fake news battles, ethical integrity and nothing less than the matter of free speech. And this time the allegations might really do harm.

Prominent protests have always accompanied the rise of the corporation, and yet, the current wave of artists abandoning the platform, following Canadian major folk musician Neil Young in the wake of his public reckoning of the service over the misinformation-promoting stances on the coronavirus and vaccines of podcaster Joe Rogan ( The Joe Rogan Experience), might just be the biggest one the Swedish tech giant had yet to face in its more than a decade-long existence. Nevertheless, despite numerous irritations, inquiries and protests in the past, the platform still has acquired something of an essential player in the music business, which only few artists can afford to dispense.

From an artist perspective, the global number one streaming service Spotify is rather a foe than a friend.

Neil young spotify story