Spotify has quietly removed more than 110 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast following criticism from celebrities.
The podcaster, whose series The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the platform’s most popular podcasts, has come under fire for promoting the spread of Covid-19 “misinformation”.
Musician Neil Young led a boycott of the service, which has since seen his music, alongside Joni Mitchell’s, Graham Nash’s and Indie Arie’s, taken down.
While Young, Mitchell and Nash criticised Rogan for promoting the “misinformation”, Arie said that her decision stemmed from the “problematic” Rogan’s “language around race”.
The Grammy Award-winning musician elaborated by saying her request was inspired by Rogan’s repeated use of the N-word in old podcast episodes.
After the musician shared a compilation of the podcaster using the racial slur, the podcaster faced renewed criticism, and issued an apology on Instagram, telling his followers: “There’s nothing I can do to take that back – I wish I could.”
Despite Young’s initial ultimatum, Spotify has remained loyal to Rogan, who has a $100m deal with the platform. However, the platform said it would add Covid-19 content advisory labels in response to the backlash. Rogan has supported this move.
Now, though, JRE Missing – a website that automatically detects deleted episodes of podcasts – has found that Spotify has quietly removed 113 episodes of Rogan’s podcast.
Deleted episodes include ones featuring far-right commentators, including Alex Jones, and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
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Joe Rogan has hosted several contentious figures throughout his time with Spotify
(Getty Images)
Jones was banned by Spotify for creating “hate content”, although previously permitted Rogan to have him as a guest on his show. The episode has now been deleted.
Last month, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle also revealed they had “expressed concerns” to Spotify, with whom they have a deal worth a reported $18m (£13.3m), about the spreading of “disinformation”.
In the wake of this statement, an old episode in which he shared his candid views on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, resurfaced online.
