Spotify’s attempt to use the Facebook playbook over Joe Rogan won’t wash

theguardian.com:

Two decades ago, the late and much-lamented David Bowie said something that was eerily prophetic. “Music itself,” he observed, “is going to become like running water or electricity.” His point was that in 2002 we were still carrying our music in little bottles called iPods, just as Victorian travellers in India carried bottles of drinking water because you couldn’t rely on their being a safe and sanitary public supply.

Spool forward 20 years and Spotify, the Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, is, in Bowie’s terms, the global music authority, providing sanitised recorded music everywhere, on demand. At the moment, it has something like 406 million active monthly users, of whom more than 180 million pay for its “premium” (advertising-free) service.

Given its dominance in the distribution of music, Spotify has inevitably been at the centre of controversies about the royalties musicians get paid for having their work streamed on the platform. In 2009, for example, it was reported that Lady Gaga’s hit song Poker Face had been streamed 1m times on Spotify, for which she received the princely royalty of $167! In May 2015, Spotify, seeing that Apple and Amazon were getting into the music streaming business, decided that it was also going to diversify into podcasts. And in May 2020 the company persuaded the popular American comedian Joe Rogan to move his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, exclusively to Spotify in return for a reported $100m.

In January this year, an episode of the Rogan show prompted an open letter signed by 270 health care professionals calling on Spotify to develop a counter-misinformation policy on the platform. The complainants especially