American commentator and popular podcast host Joe Rogan has found himself in the centre of another controversy, as Spotify quietly removed several episodes of his show, after multiple videos of him using racial slurs surfaced on the internet.
The New York Times has reported that over 70 episodes of his show The Joe Rogan Experience have been removed by the audio streaming giant. All the episodes were recorded between 2009 and 2018. However, Spotify is yet to comment on whether the episodes were removed for Rogan’s usage of slurs.
The issue first came to light when singer India Arie posted a video clip on Instagram, showcasing the commentator using the ‘N-word’ in his show multiple times. In another video, Rogan is seen making racist comments about his time in a black neighbourhood in Philadelphia. He says, “We walked into Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa, dude.”
Following the allegation, Joe Rogan took to his Instagram to apologise for his behaviour. He called it “the most regretful and shameful thing that I have ever had to talk about publicly.” He said, “There’s a video that is out that is a compilation of me saying the ‘N-word’. It’s a video that is made of clips that is taken out of context of me and 12 years of conversation of my podcast. It’s all smushed together and it looks fucking horrible even to me.”
He went on to say, “I never used it to be racist, because I’m not racist.”
According to a report by Variety, Spotify executives met with Joe Rogan to discuss the controversy and he suggested that they remove the episodes while he puts out an apology.
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Singer India Arie also put out a post on Instagram saying that she was planning to pull her music and podcast from the streaming platform. She wrote, “I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than his Covid interviews. For me it’s also about his language around race.”
She is not the first artist to remove her content from Spotify because of Joe Rogan. Earlier, several musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell withdrew their music from Spotify, after the streaming platform refused to remove Joe Rogan’s podcast for spreading misinformation about Covid-19.
Following this mass exile of musicians, the audio streaming service announced that it will add a content advisory to any episode that discusses the Covid-19 pandemic.