You didn't wait long at Apple Music.

But the opportunity was too good to pass up.

"The home of Neil Young" has been on the Twitter profile of the service since Friday morning German time.

Significantly smaller providers such as Tidal and Deezer are also more or less subtly pointing out that Neil Young's releases will continue to be available on them - in contrast to the market leader Spotify.

On Wednesday evening, the Swedish service announced that the two-time Grammy winner's music would be removed from the platform.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Earlier, Young announced moves to remove it as celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan was spreading misinformation about coronavirus vaccines ("You can have Rogan or Young. Not both.").

"We regret Young's decision and hope he returns soon," said a Spotify spokesman.

"We want to offer our users the music and audio content from around the world," the statement continued.

This is associated with great responsibility and the task of maintaining a balance between the "security of our listeners and the freedom of the 'creators'".

Spotify has deleted more than 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid-19 since the pandemic began.

In his podcast – the most popular show on Spotify with around 11 million listeners per episode – Rogan often spends hours talking to his guests about all sorts of topics.

Tesla founder Elon Musk was already a guest, which many non-listeners remembered above all because he pulled a joint on the show ("The Joe Rogan Experience" is a video podcast"), but also well-known conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent figure on the US political right.

So this is by no means the first time there has been trouble around Rogan's show or him.

In the course of the pandemic, too, he had already come under criticism when he said in April 2021 that, in his opinion, young, healthy people should not be vaccinated.

 "Place of Life-threatening Corona Disinformation"

The current hook is a broadcast from the end of December, in which the US virologist Robert Malone was a guest. Malone once researched mRNA technology himself, but has long been accused of spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation about Covid 19 vaccinations. Twitter recently blocked his account for this reason.

On the show with Rogan, for example, he explained that part of the population was basically “hypnotized” to believe what the media and presidential adviser Anthony Fauci said about vaccinations.

In January, around 270 doctors, scientists and healthcare workers wrote an open letter to Spotify about this program, among other things.

By his own account, Young became aware of the topic through this letter.

In a statement on Wednesday, he thanked his label for the support, which apparently either holds the rights to his recordings or has a license agreement for marketing - and explained his move by saying that Spotify had become a "place of life-threatening corona disinformation", which threatened young listeners in particular.