Spotify’s staff was up in arms about the company and co-founder/CEO Daniel Ek’s defense of Joe Rogan in a town hall meeting Wednesday that followed its middling quarterly report and subsequent stock drop, according to a report in the Verge that cites a leaked audio recording of the meeting.
In Ek’s 15-minute speech, he positioned the company as both a platform and publisher, saying that “There are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive,” he said, but defended the company’s relationship with the controversial podcaster by stating, “If we 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.” Reps for Spotify did not immediately respond to Variety‘s requests for comment.
Spotify shares were down more than 16% in midday trading, to a 21-month low for the stock.
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According to company staffers cited by the Verge, employees had been “skeptically awaiting” the town hall meeting for days as the controversy accelerated around Spotify’s exclusive podcast deal with Rogan and the Covid-19 and vaccination misinformation espoused by some of his guests. The situation has led to criticism from the medical and science community, and for artists including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other musicians and podcasters to ask for their music to be removed from the service.
According to the report, Ek said Rogan’s program was the most searched podcast on the platform, and that it was vital to the success of the company’s podcasting business, which generates far more profit for it than music. He noted that the company was working to make deals with “critical hardware partners like Amazon, Google, and even Tesla,” which are building “similar streaming services with essentially the same content.”
“To combat this, we needed to find leverage, and one way we could do this was in the form of exclusives,” he said, according to the report. “To be frank, had we not made some of the choices we did, I am confident that our business wouldn’t be where it is today.”
Speaking specifically about Rogan, Ek reiterated his stance that the company needs to host polarizing commentary in order to succeed.
“I understand the premise that because we have an exclusive deal with him, it’s really easy to conclude we endorse every word he says and believe the opinions expressed by his guests. That’s absolutely not the case,” he said, before stating that he personally doesn’t agree with many of Rogan’s comments. “We’re defining an entirely new space of tech and media. We’re a very different kind of company, and the rules of the road are being written as we innovate.”
He then said the nature of the company’s deal with Rogan does not necessarily give it editorial control. “Even though JRE is an exclusive, it is licensed content. It is important to note that we do not have creative control over Joe Rogan’s content. We don’t approve his guests in advance, and just like any other creator, we get his content when he publishes, and then we review it, and if it violates our policies, we take the appropriate enforcement actions.” He added that a “number” of Rogan episodes have been removed because they violate the platform’s rules.
However, employees fired back during the ensuing Q&A session. According to the report, they asked whether the platform rules are strong enough, if the company’s latest actions did enough to address the scientific community’s concerns, and how employees’ work to advance diversity within the company can reckon with some Rogan comments, like his questioning of Black identity.
Ek responded by saying that “exclusivity does not equal endorsement” and the solution might be to bring in more exclusives: “The real thing here is to try to go for an even broader set of exclusives that represent even more voices.”
Few employees seemed satisfied with Ek’s responses, according to the report.
While Ek and the company responded to the Young-Rogan controversy on Sunday by publicly publishing its content guidelines (some of which had been leaked to the Verge last week) and pledging to include content warnings and links to Covid-19 information on podcasts that discuss the issue, neither Young nor the medical-science community have weighed in on whether those measures seem adequate.
One Spotify employee quoted by the Verge in Thursday’s article said, “People are feeling increasingly frustrated that no matter what the company says messaging-wise, or no matter what people’s initiatives are, it all kind of ladders up to, ‘What’s the best for Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan’s audience?’”
Additional reporting by Todd Spangler.
