David Crosby and Stephen Stills have joined Neil Young and Graham Nash in asking their labels to remove their collective recordings from Spotify.
According to the announcement, in support of stopping harmful misinformation about Covid-19 on Joe Rogan’s Spotify-hosted podcast, the musicians have decided to remove their records from the streaming platform including the recordings of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Crosby-Nash, as well as Crosby’s and Stills’ solo projects.
Nash has already begun the process to take down his solo recordings.
In a unified statement, the band members commented, “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences. Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music – or the music we made together – to be on the same platform.”
Reps for Spotify did not immediately respond to comment.
Following a similar request by Joni Mitchell, the move reunites the five artists, who have been friends and collaborators since the 1960s, in a stance that they certainly could not have imagined 50 years ago.
While only longtime Young and Bruce Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren has joined their stance, many musicians have said that they would like to remove their music from the streaming giant — the world’s largest paid music-subscription service — but either can’t legally do so, since their music is actually owned by record labels, or cannot afford to. ♦
