Plenty of good music features bad language, disturbing ideas and violence. On the other hand, few want tech executives to become censors. Facebook was used to foment genocide in Myanmar: one day audio might be, too. On the one hand, most consumers want protection from the most harmful content, the best example being the incitement to violence, which even America’s First Amendment condemns. The vaccines bust-up is their first taste of an argument that other social networks have grappled with for years and which is now coming to audio. Unlike other social networks, however, audio platforms have little experience in moderating content. The result is that the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube. Likewise, most of the tens of thousands of new songs uploaded to Spotify every day are recorded in bedrooms and garages.

The vast majority are amateurs, uploading their shows to Spotify’s platform as easily as they would to a social network. Most of the 3.2m podcasters on Spotify are not like Mr Rogan, who sold his show to the company in 2020 for a reported $100m. The fact that share prices in Spotify and other platforms such as Meta, the parent of Facebook, are tumbling because of slowing growth underlines how that gamble is, in the most literal sense, Spotify’s business.īut the dispute points to a trickier emerging problem.

As a commercial question, Spotify has made a publisher’s gamble that his popular show will attract more customers than it repels. As a matter of principle, Mr Rogan should be free to speak. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify says, the company’s own content rules. Mr Rogan is a bigmouth and he has been wrong about covid-19 and probably much else.

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