As pressure mounted on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes f...
As pressure mounted on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes from his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.
In one Instagram Video, Rogan — whose talk show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is Spotify’s most popular podcast, and has been available there exclusively for over a year — addressed what he called “the most regrettable and the most shameful thing I have ever had to do”. speak publicly. A compilation video showed Rogan using the insult several times in previous episodes of his show; it had been shared by singer India.Arie, who pulled her catalog from Spotify in protest at what she called Rogan’s “Race Language”.
Rogan said the compilation was taken from “12 years of conversations” on his show, and sounded “awful, even to me”. The clips, he said, were taken out of context, which he said included discussions of how he had been used by comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who were black, and Lenny Bruce, who was white.
When releasing the clip compilation, Arie noted that Rogan “shouldn’t even utter the word. Don’t say it, in any context. In his video, Rogan said he came to terms with that view. “That’s not my word to use,” he said. “I’m well aware of that now.” He added that he hadn’t uttered the insult “in years”.
This week, Arie joined a small but influential boycott of Spotify led by musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchellwho cited complaints from medical professionals that guests on Rogan’s show had spread misinformation about the coronavirus.
In his latest video, Rogan also discussed a clip from another podcast episode, which he said he deleted, in which he described seeing “Planet of the Apes” at a theater in a black neighborhood. of Philadelphia. “I was trying to make the story entertaining and said it was like we went out and we were in Africa. It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes’,” he said. he said, adding that it was a “silly” thing to say that “it looks terrible even in context.”
Listeners have noticed that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” have been quietly deleted in recent days by Spotify. Neither Rogan nor Spotify offered an explanation, and company representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. Reddit commenters have speculated that some of the missing episodes may contain the insult, though it’s unclear.
Understanding the Joe Rogan-Spotify controversy
A cheeky personality. Podcast host Joe Rogan has built a huge following by defying traditional mainstream fame-screening restrictions. He was recently criticized for spreading false information about Covid-19 on his show on the Spotify audio streaming service.
Rogan, a comedian and sports commentator, started his show in 2009 and built a huge following on YouTube before signing an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify in 2020 worth $100 million or more. According to the website JRE missingFollowing the show, the latest round of deletions means that a total of 113 episodes – out of more than 1,700 since the podcast began – have been removed from Spotify since Rogan’s show became an exclusive offering there- low.
Since young called to have his music removed from Spotify on January 24, the company came under increasing pressure from musicians and other podcasters over Rogan’s show; the dispute also resurfaced musicians’ longstanding complaints about low royalty payments.
Spotify responded with publish its content policies and said Rogan had to respect them. But Daniel Ek, the company’s chief executive, resisted calls to drop Rogan, and also pushed back against arguments that Spotify is acting as a publisher of Rogan, claiming Spotify is instead a “platform” that has no prior editorial control over Rogan’s show.
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