It wasn’t just theoretical for Young: he had rehearsed the newly reconstituted version of Crazy Horse, done a handful of blazing preview shows with them, and was on the verge of announcing a reunion tour. On March 9, 2020, Young was among the first big names to say that touring shouldn’t happen for the foreseeable future, when shows were still ongoing and lockdowns were still a little bit away.

Hard as it might be to believe that the audiophile-rocker is concerned with anything more than he is lossy audio, it turns out that loss of life is up there. And yeah, that and Spotify’s long-controversial payout rates to artists certainly count as bonus beefs.īut it would be extremely difficult for any cynic to argue that Young hasn’t made a stand in favor of people not dying, or not being guided towards decisions that might make them die, from the very first days it became clear the world was about to be engulfed in a pandemic. Others will say his issue with Spotify really has to do with his long-standing complaints with the service’s lack of any high-definition tier.

(Wait, he had himself removed from the service… Is self-censorship also evil, now?) Some will wonder if his move was self-serving, as if the new subscriptions he’ll draw to his personal streaming service, Neil Young Archives, will make up for the $754,000 that Billboard estimates comes into his personal checking account every year from Spotify, after others take their share of his $2.8 million revenue. There are many arguments to be had about whether Young’s stance in having his music removed from Spotify is “censorious,” as some libertarians and most of the right would have it. Joe Rogan is Spotify’s $100 million man, but for the length of one nervous weekend, at least, Neil Young was Spotify’s $20-billion-loss man. But it would be dangerous to surmise that the very short-term loss the company suffered is an unrepeatable phenomenon, or won’t have ripples. The 11-figure hit that Spotify took in the stock market at the end of last week was recovered Monday, after Rogan’s video quasi-apology was found sufficiently mollifying by financial forecasters.

Was the damage he did to Spotify (or to Joe Rogan, or to the whole idea of corporations being responsible for what they pay for) lasting, or just a blip? That may be worked out in the fine points of history, not tomorrow’s headline.

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