Bernie Sanders was a guest, as was Kanye West. Rogan’s podcast is so popular because he is, for whatever it’s worth, hearing out people’s points of view no matter how crackpot or mainstream they are. Even though Rogan has positioned himself as an everyman - the kind of person you’d expect to have some off-the-wall social-media posts - he’s an institution unto himself with an audience of 11 million monthly listeners. It’s fundamentally different than, say, seeing your friends and family members posting fake COVID information on their Facebook feeds. This brings us to The Joe Rogan Experience, which Spotify mentions in its regulatory filings as a moneymaker. user growth had plateaued, and the new listeners spent less money. So it was no wonder Spotify’s stock price fell to half its peak from last February through last week: U.S. user on that platform brought in 11 times as much money as those from the Asia-Pacific region according to its parent company’s most recent annual report. To take an example from another tech giant, Facebook, the average revenue per U.S. consumers, by and large, spend a lot more than those anywhere else in the world. Those global trends tend to be bad for tech companies. is still the app’s biggest listener base, it’s making up a shrinking proportion of all its revenue. Crucially, it has also pushed to get more listeners globally - so much so that, while the U.S. Since 2019, Spotify has been trying to get away from just being a music-streaming app and bigfooted its way into becoming one of the biggest podcasting streamers, even trying to rival the flash-in-the-pan live-audio app Clubhouse. Spotify, headquartered in Sweden and valued at about $36 billion, is massive by just about every standard, with more than 173 million listeners and the vast majority of its money coming from subscribers who pay about $10 a month to listen to some 70 million tracks. It was all very neat and sounded nice even as it added up to very little. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said the company would label podcast episodes that have misinformation in them. The tension reached a head before the markets opened with Rogan taking to Instagram to offer a semi-apology for giving the mic to COVID cranks, saying he will change his format around such controversial guests. On Monday morning, the world of capital rallied around the Swedish streaming company, sending the company’s stock up more than 12 percent - a surge that, if it holds, would be one of its best days ever on the New York Stock Exchange - despite major artists such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell bolting over the platform’s most popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, airing COVID-19 misinformation. I think it’s important to keep in mind that Joe Rogan spreading this misinformation has real-world consequences that can have really dire effects for marginalized people.Five years after the #DeleteUber hashtag ushered in the first broad Big Tech boycott - and failed to gain any long-term traction - calls to do the same thing to Spotify over Joe Rogan have sputtered out after hardly a week. That can take someone from being an everyday person suddenly being fed news and misinformation about QAnon and other right-wing lies. Let’s say you’re a young man listening to The Joe Rogan Experience, and you want to get tips on bodybuilding or how to eat healthfully, and then Rogan starts discussing that vaccines are a form of gene therapy with Ben Shapiro, and then perhaps you go to Ben Shapiro’s website, The Daily Wire, and there, you fall into a cesspool of hatred and bigotry, and once you click on a Daily Wire article, if you share it on Facebook, you’re just going to be led further and further down the far-right rabbit hole. One thing we’ve done at Media Matters is try to document how social media algorithms and far-right online communities can radicalize everyday people fairly easily.
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