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India.Arie To Spotify: ‘Neil Young Opened A Door That I MUST Walk Through’

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India.Arie is the latest in a flurry of artists who are taking their music down from Spotify following the lead of Neil Young. While Young cited the ongoing vaccine misinformation being purveyed by Joe Rogan on Spotify’s popular The Joe Rogan Podcast as to why he’s removing his catalog from the platform, Arie finds Rogan problematic for more than his views on the COVID vaccine. Namely his language on race.

Arie is not only removing her solo recordings from the platform but also her podcast Songversation from the platform. She joins Young, Joni Mitchell, and Graham Nash in actively taking a stand with regards to their Spotify presence. Arie issued a scathing statement on her Instagram feed and wrote the following:

“I have decided to pull my music and podcast from Spotify,” Arie said in an Instagram post. “Neil Young opened a door that I must walk through. I believe in freedom of speech. However, I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than his Covid interviews. For me, it’s also his language around race. What I am talking about is RESPECT – who gets it and who doesn’t. Paying musicians a Fraction of a penny? and HIM $100M? This shows the company that they are and the company that they keep. I’m tired.”

It’s an impressive statement from Arie, a four-time Grammy winner and multi-platinum selling artist. The dominoes seem to keep tipping for Spotify, whose new “content advisory” warnings, are clearly not enough of a move to satisfy the valid concern of a growing number of artists.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After Pulling His Music Off Spotify Due To Joe Rogan, Neil Young Is Now Criticizing The Platform’s Audio Quality

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Neil Young has officially pulled his music off Spotify, citing his distaste for the streaming service giving a platform to known anti-vaccine conspiracist, Joe Rogan. In the past, Neil has taken umbrage with streaming services that didn’t support high quality sound, even going so far as to create his own mp3 player at one point.

Now that most of his music, at least, is off Spotify, he’s taken back up that old point to further criticize the platform. Today, Young wrote a short missive on his site about the situation, and he also repeatedly notes that when he left Spotify “I felt better,” and encourages listeners to really dig into their experience with the platform. Read it here or check it out in full below.

“When I left SPOTIFY, I felt better.

Digital music has been with us about 40 years now. Digital, rather than reproducing copies of the music as we did back in the analog day, reconstitutes it from 1s and 0s and plays back data that you hear as music.

This allows business people like those who run SPOTIFY to cut the quality right down to 5% of the music’s content. It’s just math. It’s easy to do that with digital, thus allowing more songs and less music to stream faster. That’s because 95% is missing. Thats what SPOTIFY the Tech company does. SPOTIFY then sells you the downgraded music.
When I started everyone got to hear all the music. 100%.

AMAZON, APPLE MUSIC and Qobuz deliver up to 100% of the music today and it sounds a lot better than the shitty degraded and neutered sound of SPOTIFY. If you support SPOTIFY, you are destroying an art form. Business over art. SPOTIFY plays the artist’s music at 5% of its quality and charges you like it was the real thing.

AMAZON, APPLE MUSIC and Qobuz now deliver the real thing. SPOTIFY is ripping you off and has been since day 1. No goosebumps from SPOTIFY sound!

Switch to one of the alternatives – companies that support the arts. Real sound is available there. AMAZON, APPLE MUSIC and Qobuz You just have to leave Spotify and go to a new place that truly cares about music quality.

I met Danile [sic] Ek when he started SPOTIFY. it sounded to me like he was really going to be getting into it. That was a long time ago. I wonder what happened.

When I left Spotify, I felt better.

I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.

As an unexpected bonus, I sound better everywhere else.

love earth be well neil”

Migos’ ‘Culture’ Disappears From Streaming On Its Fifth Anniversary

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While progressive Atlanta trap trio Migos had plenty of hits in their early career — the biggest being “Versace” thanks to its remix from Drake — it was their 2017 album Culture that turned them into a national phenomenon. It was the band’s first album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and launched their chart-topping single “Bad And Boujee” with Lil Uzi Vert, making Migos a household name. Today is its fifth anniversary, but fans looking to give it a nostalgic spin the commemorate the occasion are out of luck as the album has mysteriously disappeared from streaming platforms.

Neither the band nor their label, Quality Control Music, have offered any explanations for the takedown. In fact, the social media for both only contain posts celebrating the Culture sequel, Culture II, on its fourth anniversary. Meanwhile, fans on Twitter have been posting screenshots of the greyed-out song titles in their playlists and saved albums folders, wondering where the album went — and whether there will be some sort of update in the near future.

So far, Culture appears to be the only album affected, with longtime favorites like Young Rich N*ggas, YRN 2, and both Culture follow-ups remaining intact. It also appears that whatever is happening here hasn’t affected the album on Tidal, so perhaps it’s just temporary. Meanwhile, Quavo’s promotional post for his own new single releasing tonight has been bombarded with requests from fans to bring back Culture. Whether or not Quavo has the pull to make it happen remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Neil Young Has Threatened To Leave Spotify Because They Allow Joe Rogan To Spread Vaccine Misinformation: ‘They Can Have Rogan Or Young’

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Who would you prefer: the weakest link on the ‘90s sitcom NewsRadio or the legend who wrote “Cinnamon Girl”? That’s the choice Neil Young is giving Spotify. The music streamer is home to dozens and dozens of Neil Young releases, from his self-titled 1969 debut to last year’s excellent Crazy Horse reunion Barn. It’s also home to the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, whose host regularly spouts misinformation about the two-years-old-and-counting pandemic.

Now Young is taking a stand. As per Rolling Stone, the rocker wrote a letter to his management and label, sking them to remove some of the greatest songs ever recorded from the streamer that also allows a guy who used to force people to eat bugs to help make a public health crisis even worse.

“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. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he charged. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Young is the latest figure to come out against Rogan, who has fed his 11 million subscribers nonsense that is sometimes debunked on his show by his guests. Earlier this month, 250 doctors signed an open letter, begging Spotify to “to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform” by implementing a policy against misinformation. Meanwhile, the day before Young came out against Rogan, the U.S. saw almost 700,000 new COVID cases, as well as over 2,000 COVID-related deaths.

In the meantime, you better take one last spin of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night, maybe even Everybody’s Rockin’ before it vamooses, all for a guy who’d rather take medication also used on horses than get a free and effective vaccine.

(Via Rolling Stone)

Neil Young is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Weeknd Surpasses Justin Bieber For The Most Monthly Listeners On Spotify

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The Weeknd began the year by releasing his sixth album Dawn FM, which the singer teased and promoted for more than six months. The album gave fans not only 16 songs but also contributions from Jim Carrey, Lil Wayne, Tyler The Creator, Quincy Jones, and Oneohtrix Point Never. Despite the hype behind it, Dawn FM failed to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, as it was beaten by Gunna’s DS4EVER, which outsold it by just 2,300 copies.

Despite this, The Weeknd did accomplish something big: He recently passed Justin Bieber as the musician with the most listeners on Spotify. A press release revealed that The Weeknd has 85,667,564 monthly listeners on the app, giving him the most for any artist at the moment. It stops a streak that Bieber has held since last spring. Regardless, Bieber still holds the title for the most listeners at any point in Spotify history, after he became the first artist in the platform’s history to have more than 90 million monthly listeners.

Recently The Weeknd released videos for “Gasoline” and “Sacrifice” from Dawn FM. He also shared two new “alternate world” versions of songs from Dawn FM.

Gunna is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Rap Caviar Launched Some ‘Rap Mount Rushmore’ Murals That Surely Won’t Be Controversial

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Let’s begin by thanking Spotify for the great utility of their plentiful playlists. For instance, in the Running section of the app, the pop playlists are broken down into ’00s pop, ’10s pop, and even ’90s pop — this one goes hard for those middle miles.

Anyway, it seems like their hip-hop curation team, Rap Caviar, has decided to break down their own genre in a similar way, by organizing it into decades. That seems fine, except, they also decided to tap into the ongoing greatest-of-all-time conversation by actually painting a “Rap Mount Rushmore” mural in various cities. They also chose to break their Rushmore down into just the 2010s, selecting Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Nicki Minaj, and J. Cole. Which is exactly where things might get a little messier.

First of all, I have great respect for Nicki Minaj and believe she’s an incredibly important MC, but her greatest sphere of influence was definitely waning around 2015. By the time Queen hit, she wasn’t very influential at all. So putting her on the mountain when other massive names like Future, Young Thug, Tyler The Creator, Travis Scott and even Kanye himself are all let off is pretty alarming for even a casual rap listener. She might be there due to the fact that she called out a similar Rushmore on Twitter for not including her, but hey, desire isn’t achievement.

The fact that there’s no southern rap (no, J. Cole doesn’t count) is another issue some might find contentious! Anyway, at least they got Kendrick right.

Eminem’s Daughter Hailie Mathers Listened To Eminem A Lot In 2021, As Her Spotify Wrapped Proves

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Eminem Marshall Mathers 36th Annual Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony 2021
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There’s no need to explain that Eminem has a lot of fans, but in case you didn’t know, his daughter, Hailie Scott Mathers, also has a bunch of stans: She has over two million followers on Instagram and a few hundred thousand more on TikTok. Speaking of TikTok, she recently took to the platform to reveal a bit about her 2021 Spotify Wrapped, noting that her most-played artist of the year was actually her dad.

In the video, which has nearly 7 million views as of this post, Mathers lip-syncs to The Real Housewives Of Potomac‘s Wendy Osefo talking about being a Nicki Minaj fan, on the November 8 episode of The Wendy Williams Show. Meanwhile, text on screen reads, “‘Do you listen to your dad’s music?’ ‘What??? Do I listen to my dad’s music?’ ‘I think my dad’s gone crazy.’” The video then cuts to a recording of her Spotify Wrapped presentation, which says not only that Eminem was her top artist of the year, but that she was in the top three percent of his listeners on the streaming platform.

@hailie_jade_

top 3% 💀

♬ original sound – Hailie Jade

Indeed, Mathers and her dad appear to share a good relationship. In 2018, The Daily Mail asked Mathers if “if she sees her father often and he’s supportive” and she responded, “Of course, we are very close.” Meanwhile, on 2020, Eminem spoke about his daughter with Mike Tyson on his Hotboxin’ With Mike Tyson podcast. The boxer asked if Mathers was thinking about having children and Eminem replied, “Not babies, nope. Just a boyfriend and she’s doing good. She’s made me proud for sure. She graduated from college, 3.9.”

Artists Share Reactions To The 2021 Year-End Spotify Wrapped Lists

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If you’ve been on social media today, you’re probably well aware that Spotify unveiled the annual Spotify Wrapped feature today, where music fans see lists of the songs, artists, genres, and more that they most engaged with on the streaming platform over the past year. While it’s an opportunity for fans to look back on 2021, it’s also a neat chance for artists to see just how music their work was appreciated. So, as Wrapped started making the rounds today, artists shared their reactions.

Bad Bunny’s reaction wasn’t on social media, but in real life. As he was told in-person that he was the year’s most-streamed artist worldwide, he was all smiles. He was asked what fans can look forward to in 2022 and he said, “The same! I don’t go into it to be the No. 1 most streamed artist. I just make music. I just enjoy my ‘work.’ I hope 2022 is going to be great.”

Lil Nas X also took time to answer a bunch of fans who reached out via social media to let him know that he made their lists.

A bunch of artists beyond the aforementioned shared their thoughts about Spotify Wrapped, so check out some other reactions below.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Bad Bunny Takes The Lead As Spotify’s Most-Streamed Artist Globally In 2021

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It’s that time of the year again — Spotify Wrapped is here. While many are spending the first day of December decorating for the holidays, music lovers around the globe are checking their Spotify account to see a round up of their most-streamed artists, albums, and songs of the year. The data shows that Olivia Rodrigo had a massive year, as she had the most-streamed song and album worldwide. But there was another artist whose music was streamed the most times around the world on the platform: Bad Bunny.

Thanks to Bad Bunny’s prolific songwriting, the Puerto Rican rapper received the most streams on Spotify out of any other artist around the world. According to Spotify’s data, rapper was streamed 9.1 billion times globally this year, an impressive feat for an artist who didn’t even release an album in 2021. Following behind Bad Bunny in worldwide streaming numbers is Taylor Swift at No. 2, BTS at No. 3, Drake at No. 4, and Justin Bieber at No. 5.

When Bad Bunny found out the news, he still remained humble. The musician said he makes music for the love of it and his goal was never to be the most-streamed artists around the world.

While Bad Bunny may have been the top-streamed artist around the globe, the stats look a little different in the US. Bad Bunny was the fifth-most-streamed artist on Spotify in the US, while Drake took the No. 1 slot. Taylor Swift was behind Drake while Juice WRLD came in at No. 3 and Kanye West at No. 4.

See a video of Bad Bunny finding out he’s 2021’s most-streamed artist above.

Check out more Spotify Wrapped data here, and to get your own Wrapped info for 2021, check out the Spotify mobile app.