Will Neil Young ever see a protest through to fruition?
I was in immediate conflict when Neil Young announced his departure from Spotify as a platform.
Here I was, being held ransom by the digital and financial ease of a deeply troubling platform, already battling with my own conscience while using it, to then have an artist I regularly play announce his exit was a lot. When I took a breath and looked over at my copy of his On The Beach record, I grew up and knew that in reality, I would survive this ordeal. Once that feeling had sunk in, I realised what an important step this was for music.
While Young’s removal of his music from Spotify in January 2022 was on the basis of not wanting to share a platform with Joe Rogan, in belief he was spreading misinformation about Covid-19 to mass audiences, his decision highlighted all troubling areas of the business. From questionable podcast strategies to pathetic royalty payments, Spotify has been mired in immorality for the past five years, and it felt like the singer’s move to discard his music from the platform was the first falling domino.
With immediate effect, his discography was removed, soon followed by Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Failure and Nils Lofgren. These legends of music history were taking a modern protest pledge, and while it was of course easier for them to do so than for burgeoning artists, I had hoped they could provide a warm blanket under which future artists could nestle, as they joined them in a fight against tech giants.
But in March 2024, when Rogan’s podcast was no longer exclusive to Spotify, Young returned, stating “Other music services [including] Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal… have started serving the same disinformation podcast I had opposed at Spotify” on his website, adding, “Because I cannot leave all those services like I did Spotify, because my music would have no streaming outlet to music lovers at all, I have returned.” Sadly, the anti-establishment icon had given up the fight, and the protest was over.
Fast forward a year, and Young had a new axe to grind. In what was surely a PR nightmare for the festival, he took it upon himself to announce he would no longer headline Glastonbury on the basis that they were “now under corporate control and is not the way I remember it being. We will not be playing Glastonbury on this tour because it is a corporate turn-off, and not for me like it used to be”.
Then, 24 hours later, after a what was surely frenzied phone call from the Eavis family, Young was back on the Pyramid Stage, playing the Saturday night big slot. In a quicker and clunkier U-turn than before, the man had once again let his resistance crumble with no real sentiment being established from it. Sure, we can’t have expected him to win every time, and some form of commercial compromise feels inevitable, but both protests had no real substantial follow-up or side-win from them, rendering the power of these crusades questionable.
Now, in his latest protest, Young has officially quit Facebook and Instagram, condemning Meta’s reported “unconscionable use of chatbots with children”. It’s come in the wake of an announcement following a Reuters investigation that uncovered internal Meta documents showing the company’s AI chatbots were permitted to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual”.
So, of course, Young is once again on the right side of history, publicly calling out injustice and taking actual steps to disengage with troublesome tech conglomerates. But there is a very real chance that the public perception of his outrage will just be that: outrage.
His last two major protests fell through without any actualised impact, and so Young’s response to Meta’s AI change reads, to many, as such an existential diatribe. Rebellion and protest that engage the crucially young audiences of the modern world are more nuanced and, excuse the pun, ‘meta’ in how they engage with the topic.
While I admire his latest attempt and ultimately agree with every fibre of its sentiment, the truth is Young’s presence on Meta isn’t impactful enough to warrant a shutout. Were he to engage with contemporary artists and collaborate with them in protest, he’d likely have a chance of crystallising his messages and not finding them lost in just another Neil Young protest ether. The free world has changed, and rockin’ in it no longer cuts it. So in that light, it’s likely we’ll see any of these protests translate into major changes.
