Laurel Canyon hive, grab some grass and assemble. David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash have united in solidarity with their bandmate Neil Young to remove their collective music catalogues from Spotify. The decision comes after Young declared in late January that he would be removing his music from the streaming service as a result of Spotify “spreading fake information about vaccines,†specifically drawing his ire to the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast,†reads a statement from the trio posted on social media. “While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this pandemic had deadly consequences. 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.†Joni Mitchell has since axed her music from the platform as well.
Young, whose discography has been scrubbed from Spotify since January 27, acknowledged in an open letter that the streaming service represented about “60 percent†of his listeners from around the world. Despite this, “I realized I could not continue to support Spotify’s life threatening misinformation to the music loving public,†he wrote. The statement from Crosby, Stills, and Nash represents a rare moment of unity for the band in recent years: They (or rather, Crosby and the other three) have been on acrimonious terms for quite some time, which worsened in 2014 after Crosby insulted Young’s future wife and called her a “poisonous predator.†Nash expressed skepticism that they would ever fully reconcile in a CBS Sunday Morning interview last year. “When that silver thread that connects a band gets broken, it’s very difficult to glue the ends together,†he explained. “It doesn’t quite work.â€