Crosby, Stills & Nash are back on Spotify, five months after the supergroup abandoned the platform in protest of Joe Rogan’s spread of COVID misinformation. The group will donate streaming profits to COVID-19 charities for “at least a month,” according to Billboard.
The musicians’ return to Spotify marks a quiet and relatively unglamorous end to their protest, which has largely had the effect of boosting Rogan’s subscriber numbers, if the podcaster is to be believed. Crosby, Stills & Nash originally announced back in February that they would pull their music in solidarity with sometimes-bandmate Neil Young, who kicked off a series of artist protests of Spotify when he removed his music and published an open letter criticizing the company for its support of Rogan.
“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” Young wrote in a since-deleted blog post.
Young, however, has not returned to Spotify, and that makes for some awkwardness with Crosby, Stills & Nash’s return. While the trio’s songs are back on Spotify, their albums under the larger banner of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young include a number of omissions: songs credited to Young are still unavailable to stream, as are a couple of songs written by Joni Mitchell, who is also protesting the platform.
Here’s what their 1970 album Déjà Vu looks like on Spotify right now:
Only six of the album’s 10 tracks are available to play due to Young and Mitchell’s music being unavailable.
Crosby, Stills & Nash said back in February that they wouldn’t bring their music back to Spotify “until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce.” But the group doesn’t appear to have issued an updated statement to say whether Spotify has made changes to satisfy their concerns.
Spotify has made some small changes since the protests started. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek promised to spend $100 million on content from marginalized groups; the company started labeling podcasts that discuss COVID-19; and Spotify published its content rules for the first time, after The Verge obtained details of its narrow medical misinformation policy.
The company has also run damage control with at least one high-profile pair of content creators. After Prince Harry and Meghan Markle criticized the company over COVID-19 misinformation, Spotify worked with the couple’s production company to smooth things over and move forward on developing a show with Markle.
