Spotify Apparently Removed Some Joe Rogan Episodes with Tool’s Maynard James Keenan and More

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According to a new report from Rolling Stone, streaming giant Spotify apparently removed close to 70 episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast from its platform. This appears to be a direct PR response to the fallout that has occurred ever since Neil Young blasted Spotify for allowing Joe Rogan to make erroneous statements about COVID-19 and safety preventions. Neil Young called Spotify’s bluff, demanding they remove Rogan or his own music. In response, Spotify removed Neil Young.

In the wake of that decision, some of Neil Young’s peers like Joni Mitchell have followed suit, as well as space-rock innovators, Failure.

Now, Spotify seemingly has removed older episodes from Joe Rogan’s podcast that featured interviews with Amy Schumer, Marc Maron, Bill Burr, Andy Dick, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan and Iliza Shlesinger. The Tool singer had been a guest many times over the years. While a lot of his episodes thankfully remain, some do appear to be missing like episode 246:

To be clear, this does not imply that Maynard nor any of the guests above did or said anything inappropriate during the podcast episode(s).

While there has been no official word from Spotify, internet conjecture (based on an apology video that Rogan posted to Instagram earlier) seems to suggest that what these interviews all had in common is that Rogan said some not OK things during them.

In the Instagram post below, he says he is addressing the  “most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.” He goes on to say this about the “out-of-context” videos:

“I haven’t said [the n-word] in years, but for a long time, when it came up in conversation, instead of saying ‘the n-word,’ I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.”

Here is the latest explanation from Joe Rogan:

 

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A post shared by Joe Rogan (@joerogan)

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Words by: The Pit staff