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#DeleteSpotify Explained: What’s Going on with Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, and Spotify?
Why famous musicians are pulling their music from the streaming platform amid the spread of COVID misinformation on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’
Spotify is the most popular music streaming platform globally, beating out its closest competitor, Apple Music, by 16% in terms of market share. As a company, they have massive reach and influence with 172 million active premium users, meaning users who pay and upgrade from Spotify’s free tier. When you factor in free users, that number goes up to 381 million.
Despite this, music streaming was never that profitable for Spotify. The music industry is a massive beast, and gaining the rights to stream an artist’s music is an expensive legal process — not to mention that an artist could decide at any moment to pull their music, just as Taylor Swift did in 2014 and as Neil Young did this week.
That’s why, in 2019, Spotify announced it would invest $500 million into podcasts. They purchased Gimlet Media and Anchor, a podcast hosting platform, and launched many exclusive podcasts that they promote heavily.
