Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in his Spotify boycott. This whole thing is getting weirder.

Joni Mitchell, fellow Canadian, and longtime friend of Neil Young, has asked that her music be pulled from Spotify. She, too, is upset that the platform doesn’t seem to want to do anything about the misinformation and disinformation about COVID and vaccines.

This is a screenshot from her website:

This makes Joni the first major musician to join up with Neil in this quest. (Peter Frampton and David Crosby have also voiced support, but that’s all they’ve done–so far.) Any other takers, I wonder?

Back to Neil. This was posted on his website yesterday (January 28).

“When I left Spotify, I felt better.”

[…]

“Amazon, Apple Music, and Qobuz deliver up to 100% of the music today and it sounds a lot better than the shitty, degraded and neutered sound of Spotify, If you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form. Business over art. Spotify plays the artists’ music at 5% of its quality and charges you like it was the real thing.”

Interesting that Spotify has lost $2 billion $4 billion in market cap since this controversy began a couple of days again. Then again, there was an overall pullback on tech spots, so we should probably be a little careful reading too much into this.

Meanwhile, Apple Music tweeted this very positive ad.

More here.

UPDATE: Nils Lofgren has joined Neil’s boycott. And then there’s all this business. David Crosby would support Neil by yanking his music if he could, but he sold it.