Guess Who's Coming Back to Spotify?

Neil Young announces return to streaming platform, still complaining about 'low-res' files
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 13, 2024 8:20 AM CDT
Guess Who's Coming Back to Spotify?
Neil Young poses for a portrait at Lost Planet Editorial in Santa Monica, California, on Sept. 9, 2019.   (Photo by Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP, File)

More than two years ago, Neil Young yanked his songs off of Spotify, a protest against what Young said was COVID vaccine misinformation being circulated by podcaster Joe Rogan. Now the singer-songwriter has announced he's coming back to the streaming music platform, though the Consequence of Sound describes his return as an "unenthusiastic" one. "Spotify, the #1 streamer of low-res music in the world—Spotify, where you get less quality than we made, will now be home of my music again," Young wrote Tuesday on his website.

Young adds that he hopes "all you millions of Spotify users enjoy my songs," though he doubles down on the quality issues, adding, "They will now all be there for you except for the full sound we created." So why would a guy who seems lukewarm at best about Spotify return to it? Young notes that Apple and Amazon's music services "have started serving the same disinformation podcast features" that he'd railed against at Spotify, and that he couldn't just pull out of those as well. If he ditched, "my music would have very little streaming outlet" available to his fans.

And so Young will begrudgingly return to Spotify's ranks, though he hopes the service will work on the quality of its output. Billboard notes that Spotify announced three years ago that it plans to introduce a "HiFi" tier with higher-res audio, but that still hasn't emerged (TechHive notes there are "hints" that service is still in the works). Young—who left Spotify one other time, in 2015, over file quality—alludes to that possibility in his message. "You have the music and the listeners!!!!" he implores the music service. "Start with a limited [high-res] tier and build from there!" Billboard estimated in September that Young lost out on about $16,000 per month in royalties during his Spotify hiatus, for a total of around $300,000 at that time. (More Neil Young stories.)

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