Several artists have withdrawn their music from Spotify in an attempt to make the website part ways with its biggest star Joe Rogan, but self-deprecating British singer James Blunt has now come up with a counterstrategy to achieve the same goal.
Blunt took to Twitter on Saturday to make it clear to his two million followers that he had no intention of joining his colleagues.
“If Spotify doesn’t immediately remove Joe Rogan, I will release new music onto the platform,” he wrote, in a humorous threat.
The post also included #youwerebeautiful hashtag, a reference to Blunt’s greatest hit “You’re Beautiful,” which came out in 2004 on the platinum album ‘Back to Bedlam.’
The 47-year-old singer and songwriter has always waxed cynical about his inability to ever repeat that success.
A few years ago, he corrected a critic on Twitter, who’d said that Blunt had “stopped being relevant in 2009.” According to the artist, this had happened already, in 2006.
Earlier this week, Neil Young quit the popular streaming service, accusing it of “spreading false information about vaccines” by providing a platform to the popular The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” he wrote.
Another music icon, Joni Mitchell, then also threatened to remove her tracks from Spotify “in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities.”
During the pandemic, podcaster Rogan has been getting a lot of heat for his vaccine skepticism and his alleged promotion of alternative Covid-19 treatments. In December, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators demanded in an open letter that Spotify remove his podcast, insisting that the service had “a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation.”
But Spotify, which has a $100-million deal with Rogan, doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to give up on what was its number-one podcast last year.