Wear Your Mask - COVID-19 Thread II

[Umbire]

Though this is way off topic, as it was explained to me, Spotify is in a bit of a bind.  The sequence goes like this: we're a software company (that has music), we gotta grow fast and get lots of users -> great, we're big, how do we make profits -> podcast ads are worth more because people don't skip them -> let's produce podcasts.  They're a publisher to Joe Rogan, but just a platform to Neil Young.  So which obligation wins?  Simultaneously, they can make the more profitable Joe Rogan fans upset along with the podcasters who make them, or they can make the more numerous classic rock fans upset.

The way out is to make the moral choice, but I really don't think that's clear either.  And it definitely depends on what morals you value more.  Academic freedom is important to me, even when it costs lives -- because sometimes it actually saves lives instead.  See the failed amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimers, which cost us ten years of research because brain researchers had to self-censor to get funding.

There was another way out.

As you said, they're the publisher for Joe Rogan, much like CBS is the publisher for home video releases of many older TV shows (including Star Trek) and Sentai Filmworks is the publisher for a noticeable fraction of anime.

CBS and Sentai put non-skippable disclaimers at the start of their disks, saying something along the lines of "the views expressed here are not necessarily the views of the publisher". (No doubt the exact text is copyrighted.) And we're all familiar with non-skippable ads in front of YouTube videos. So the technology to put a message at the start of a video exists and has been proven to work in real-world conditions.

And Twitter puts fact-check notices on tweets that are determined to contain misinformation.

All Neil Young asked for originally was a disclaimer at the start Joe Rogan's podcasts that contain misinformation, saying so.

Spotify didn't do that.

And that is what lead to "him or me", followed by so many artists pulling their content from Spotify.

Fast forward to Spotify removing several episodes with instances of the N-word from Rogan, which only further highlights the absolute cowardice of their non-decision.