Neil Young roasted for plugging Amazon Music after leaving Spotify over Joe Rogan

Neil Young, the Canadian-American singer-songwriter who pulled his music from the streaming platform Spotify over its hosting of controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, has decided to promote his music on Amazon Music instead.

Mr Young, 76, claimed on his website last week that Spotify had become “a very damaging force” for “life-threatening Covid misinformation”.

“I realized I could not continue to support Spotify’s life-threatening misinformation to the music loving public.

“Before I told my friends at Warner Bros about my desire to leave the Spotify platform, I was reminded by my own legal forces that contractually I did not have the control of my music to do that. I announced I was leaving anyway, because I knew I was. I was prepared to do all I could and more just to make sure that happened,” he wrote.

Mr Rogan has since said he will “try harder to get people with differing opinions” on his popular Spotify-exclusive podcast, while the platform’s CEO Daniel Ek said in a blog post that the service was working on a content warning for podcasts which discuss Covid-19.

With Mr Young taking his music off one of the biggest streaming platforms, the musician went on to add that “many other platforms - Amazon, Apple, and Qobuz, to name a few - present my music today in all its High-Resolution glory”.

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The remarks came ahead of him promoting his songs on Amazon Music on Twitter on Friday, when he said the company has been “leading the pack” when it comes to high-resolution audio.

However, given Amazon is not without its own controversies – namely being owned by one of the world’s richest people with an affinity for phallic spacecraft, and being subject to numerous reports of poor working practices – and so Twitter wasn’t too pleased with the promo:

Something tells us leaving one problematic streaming platform and supporting another problematic platform isn’t exactly music to people’s ears…

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