When Joe Rogan dared to think and speak differently than Democrat-Media Complex hero Dr. Fauci — science himself – on his Spotify-hosted podcast, the collective left lost its mind. Calls for the music and podcast company to deplatform Rogan were swift, but Spotify resisted the woke mob and defended its choice to carry Rogan's massively popular show, and it turns out not going woke was the right decision for more reasons than one.
It turns out that all the noise around Rogan's podcast only served to bring more users to the platform and the left's attempted boycott to punish Spotify for continuing to carry Rogan's show backfired completely. "Spotify has managed to grow," Engadget reported Wednesday, "despite a high-profile rebellion" launched by intolerant leftists:
The streaming giant today released updated financial results for the first quarter of 2022, revealing that it grew to 422 million monthly users. 182 million of which pay for Premium, with its stable of exclusive podcasts a big draw and one that Spotify is continually investing in.
Even though Spotify added a content advisory to Rogan's show and noted that it didn't endorse everything that he and his guests said on the podcast, herein lies an example that proves the reverse of "get woke, go broke" is true. Platforms acting as exactly that — platforms that allow a diverse collection of creators and views to share their content and allow a marketplace to decide what it likes and what it doesn't — will succeed.
By keeping its executives' personal views out of content decisions, Spotify retained the 11 million average listeners on each Rogan podcast episode and likely drew other subscribers and creators who saw Spotify as a place they could freely share and listen to ideas without worrying about woke censors bullying dissenting views off the platform.
As Townhall covered at the time attacks were being lobbed at Spotify, the multimedia company's CEO Daniel Ek defended its decision to continue its exclusive distribution of Rogan's show:
According to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Verge, Ek told employees that “there are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive.” There are reportedly a “number” of JRE episodes Spotify has taken down because they violate the platform’s rules, but Ek did not elaborate on which episodes were removed. However, Ek does not plan on discontinuing Rogan’s podcast on the platform.
In the meeting, Ek added that “exclusivity does not equal endorsement” and that “if we [Spotify] want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with."
“Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad," he reportedly said.
As a result, the woke mob ramped up their calls for a boycott of Spotify and several washed up musicians yanked their catalogs from Spotify's platform in an apparent attempt to punish the service that...didn't seem likely to do much. Neil Young, India Arie, Joni Mitchell, Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren, podcast host Brené Brown, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash all boycotted the platform in a case of self-aggrandizing and performative virtue signaling. But that performance did exactly the opposite of what they had intended and, if anything, only hurt their own brands and bottom lines.