Young isn’t the first artist to take issue with the world’s biggest music streaming company. He previously removed his music from the streaming site seven years ago (it later returned), complaining it offered listeners “ the worst quality in the history of broadcasting”, a theme he returned to last week, directing his fans to other streaming services that “present my music today in all its high resolution glory”.Īdele, who has had her own tussles with Spotify. It was Young who wrote Ohio, CSNY’s response to the Kent State Massacre, arguably the most famous protest song of the early 70s Young who piloted the 2006 CSNY Freedom of Speech tour, its setlist so packed with Young’s new anti-Bush protest songs that audiences in red states booed and walked out Young who threatened to pull out of a 2019 gig in Hyde Park with Bob Dylan unless the promoters ditched their sponsor, Barclays, “a fossil fuel funding entity”.Īnd he has longstanding beef with Spotify. He has a long history of political activism. He has failed to mellow with age: not for nothing is the news section of his website called the Times-Contrarian according to Young’s recent post on it, when his lawyers advised him “that contractually I didn’t have the control of my music to, I announced I was leaving anyway, because I knew I was”, which is pretty much the most Neil Youngian response imaginable. He spent a substantial chunk of the 1980s making wildly uncommercial albums, apparently with the specific intention of annoying his record label, which ended up suing him for being unpredictable – it lost, perhaps because, as his labelmate Elton John put it, its lawsuit “felt a bit like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young”.
The years that produced his most famous work also played host to Young wilfully sabotaging his own commercial prospects in order to follow his muse (or, as he memorably put it, “heading for the ditch”) suddenly abandoning tours midway by directing his tour bus to pull off the motorway en route to the next show whimsically declining to release a succession of completed albums and incurring the wrath of his partners in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) by removing their contributions from the master tapes of his songs before releasing them. He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of said blue-chip legends.
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