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Crosby, Stills & Nash’s music returns to Spotify following boycott

By | Published on Monday 4 July 2022

Crosby, Stills & Nash

The recordings catalogue of Crosby, Stills & Nash has returned to Spotify, less than six months after it was pulled in solidarity with former bandmate Neil Young’s own boycott of the streaming platform.

Young, of course, launched his boycott in January in protest against Spotify-exclusive podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, which had been accused of spreading COVID misinformation.

Crosby, Stills & Nash followed days later, saying in a statement that they had requested that the labels they work with remove from Spotify all of their recordings – including their solo work, and releases from their various collaborative projects, including those involving Young.

“We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast”, they said at the time.

“While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences”, they went on. “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”.

Spotify and Rogan have both since promised to make changes, respectively in the way they monitor podcast content and deal with controversial guests. However, this is seemingly not the reason for the CSN catalogue – including those recordings with Neil Young – returning to the platform.

Basically, although they asked their business partners to remove their music from Spotify, CSN aren’t fully in control of those recordings, and it seems it’s the entities that are in control that have decided to put the tracks back on the streaming service.

After a fan questioned this move on Twitter, Crosby replied, simply: “I don’t own it now and the people who do are in business to make money”. For his part, Crosby entered into a wide ranging rights deal with Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group in March last year.

With the Spotify streams up and running again, Crosby, Stills & Nash will seemingly donate any income they are personally due from said streams to charity for at least a month, or at least so reports Billboard.

We should note that Neil Young’s music – outside of his work with Crosby, Stills & Nash – remains off Spotify.



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