Neil Young: ‘I Have Never Been in Favor of Censorship’

Neil Young has clarified via his official website that his decision to pull his catalog from Spotify was in no way to censor Joe Rogan.

Young wrote, "I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others."

As previously reported, Young pulled his catalog from Spotify due to the Spotify-exclusive podcast The Joe Rogan Experience and its track record of spreading COVID misinformation.

Young's statement also took aim at Spotify for their streaming audio quality writing, "Digital music has been with us about 40 years now. Digital, rather than reproducing copies of the music as we did back in the analog day, reconstitutes it from 1s and 0s and plays back data that you hear as music. This allows business people like those who run Spotify to cut the quality right down to 5% of the music's content."

He added, "...Amazon, Apple Music and Qobuz deliver up to 100% of the music today and it sounds a lot better than the s----y degraded and neutered sound of Spotify. If you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form. Business over art. Spotify plays the artists’s music at 5% of its quality and charges you like it was the real thing. Amazon, Apple Music and Qobuz now deliver the real thing. Spotify is ripping you off and has been since day 1.