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Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, decided on Feb 8 to keep her podcasts on Spotify after pausing her podcasts on Feb 1 in the face of the platform’s choice to continue streaming Joe Rogan’s inflammatory podcast. Although she made a career from “Daring Greatly,” her choice was awkward and not brave.
In a post explaining her decision, she argues that because she has an exclusive contract with Spotify, she has fewer options than artists who can make their music available on other platforms. She compares Spotify to a cafeteria where people can come in and sit where they like justifying her association with a platform that hosts Joe Rogan because her fans needn’t “sit with them.” Neither point is convincing.
I’d like to address the free speech cafeteria analogy first because I think it misses some important facts.
Although Brown would like us to think of Spotify as a cafeteria, Spotify is more like a concert (or a festival) with headline acts. The most important difference is the money involved. Brown and Joe Rogan are like headliners at the show; they’re each convincing their fans to come and, when those fans come to Spotify, they either pay a subscription, or have to listen to advertisers, or both. That money is then used to pay Brown and Rogan for their exclusive contracts. And much like a concert or festival, some acts almost certainly get paid more (Rogan) than others (Brown). Still, everyone coming to the show ends up paying some to each.
The exclusive contract actually compounds the problem. Because you can’t hear Brown’s podcast except on Spotify, her fans must give their subscription and/or attention to Spotify to hear the show. Thus, Rogan also gets part of his compensation from every one of Brown’s fans she brings to the streaming service. But all contracts can be terminated, even though that is likely to cost Brown money and opportunities.
Brown says that “words matter” and that some of the content on Rogan’s podcast made her “physically sick”. The distance between Brown and Rogan comes across as being about more than just misinformation, a part of the Joe Rogan podcast that Brown thinks Spotify is beginning to address. Brown also seems concerned about core values and how they’re expressed in public. In fact, in her cafeteria analogy she says “sharing the table with Rogan puts [her] in a tremendous values conflict with very few options”.
One of those options is to stop sharing the table and to find a new (or return to an old) way of publishing her podcast. If her values are that much in conflict with Rogan’s, then she can make the decision not to force her fans to subsidize the Rogan show. It should, in fact, be “me or Joe”.
It’s great that Brown states that “I’m always going to stand firmly on the side of free speech”. But that’s not what’s at issue here. Brown leaving Spotify, or asking Spotify to remove Rogan, doesn’t mean Rogan doesn’t have free speech rights. If he left Spotify, Rogan would find another platform and his fans would follow. I think this issue is not about censorship or free speech; it’s about making your fans buy tickets to a festival where someone else is spreading misinformation and saying hurtful and racist things. India Arie really said it best when she decided to pull her music from Spotify: ”This shows the type of company they are and the company that they keep.“
Brené Brown should be brave and choose not to keep company with Joe Rogan. Words matter, and actions matter. By staying on Spotify, Brown is signaling that the cost of leaving the platform is more than she’s willing to pay to keep her fans from subsidizing Spotify or Rogan.
