Joni Mitchell is pulling her music from Spotify amid Joe Rogan backlash

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What you need to know

  • Joni Mitchell says she is removing her music from Spotify.
  • Mitchell's music will remain available on Apple Music.
  • Mitchell is concerned about Joe Rogan's podcast and anti-vax messages.

Joni Mitchell is the latest artist to back Neil Young on his spat with Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan. The musician says that she will remove all of her music from Spotify after the streamer pulled Young's music following comments about Rogan.

Posting to her official website, Mitchell said that "irresponsible people are spreading lies," alluding to complaints that Rogan's Spotify podcast, called the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), shares misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

I've decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.

Mitchell also linked to an open letter to Spotify from "global scientific and medical communities" in which calls are made for a new misinformation policy.

We are a coalition of scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators spanning a wide range of fields such as microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and neuroscience and we are calling on Spotify to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform. With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE is the world's largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Though Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, the company presently has no misinformation policy.

This comes just days after Neil Young told Spotify that he didn't his music on the same platform as Rogan — the streamer later pulled all of his music much to Apple Music's favor. Apple's own music streaming service has been on the offensive ever since.

For those wondering, yes, you can still listen to plenty of Joni Mitchell's work on Apple Music just fine.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.