[retrocat]

Whether or not Spotify is a downgrade is not the point here; the point is that Joe Rogan has a platform that allows him to propagate his message to the mass, and that Spotify has a role in that. That is all. The same could be said if he was uploading videos to YouTube, or hosting a website. At some point, some company helped him disseminate the message he wanted to spread - in the case of hosting a website, for example, a hosting provider, or a domain name service, or an ISP. I think it's nonsensical and potentially dangerous to say an ISP is responsible for what Joe Rogan has said, but on the other end of the spectrum, YouTube or Spotify has to do some sort of filtering on the content they help disseminate. How should they decide, then?

The problem with the latter part of your comment is that it assumes that everyone lives on separate islands, and that what one person does has no impact on the other people around them. It does. It's alright to say that we shouldn't dictate peoples lives or businesses, but there's a point that that breaks down - if we can't dictate people's lives, why do we jail people?

[SllX]

We don’t have laws to dictate people’s lives; we have laws to hold people to a standard and clarify process. This has nothing to do with law though, this is an internal dispute in a private organization that certainly has no business telling others how to live, in particular the guy they signed on to help expand their audience and their corporation’s paying customers.

The contract between Spotify and Joe Rogan represents a consensual trade: money for exclusive distribution of The Joe Rogan Experience. YouTube choosing to host The Joe Rogan Experience prior to this was also a trade of sorts, both made money from the arrangement, but it was a bit less airtight because YouTube has and does try to present itself as a platform just about anyone can publish on and doesn’t often make these deals. The distribution wasn’t the especially valuable part though, it was the man himself and the show Joe put together. Spotify didn’t approach Joe with a dump truck full of money to serve as Joe’s neutral platform of choice wherein Joe will follow all the same platform policies as the other shows. They approached Joe with a dump truck full of money because that was how much they valued him and the show he put together and he didn’t do anything that especially offended them (where “them” would be the people that own and control Spotify).

I don’t want to tell you what to do with your life, but I prefer to tend to my own garden before worrying about the state of another’s for I find that the sorts of people that tell others how they should live are charlatans keeping their own unkempt gardens out of sight. Nobody can nor has the moral right to control the actions of another.