India. Arie Reveals She Is Boycotting Spotify Following Joe Rogan’s Remarks About COVID-19 & His Repeated Use Of The “N” Word

India. Arie has had enough, according to a few posts on her Instagram story. The singer took to the ‘gram to explain that she’s pulling her music catalog from Spotify amid the controversy surrounding Joe Rogan. While other stars have pulled their music from the streaming platform due to Rogan allegedly spreading misinformation about COVID-19 on his podcast, Arie is not here for Rogan’s racist behavior as well as Spotify’s pay rate for artists.

Arie shared a video montage of Rogan repeatedly saying “n***er” on his podcast, and explained that she doesn’t want her music to generate money that will be used to pay Joe Rogan’s salary.

“I empathize with the people leaving for the COVID disinformation reasons, and I think that they should,” she said. “I also think that Joe Rogan has the right to say what he wants to say. I also think that I have the right to say what I want to say.”

She continued, “Spotify is built on the back of the music streaming. So they take this money that’s built from streaming and they pay this guy $100 million, but they pay us .003 percent of the penny? Just take me off.”

Arie initially announced the boycott in a Twitter thread last weekend, where she detailed her experience with being underpaid in the music industry. Other artists including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have also decided to boycott the streaming platform, but Spotify doesn’t seem to be worried about the backlash.

“In general, what I would say is, it’s too early to know what the impact may be,” Spotify’s chief executive and co-founder Daniel Ek said. “And usually when we’ve had controversies in the past, those are measured in months and not days. But I feel good about where we are in relation to that and obviously top line trends looks very healthy still.”

Spotify has been facing backlash over Rogan’s podcast since late December, after he interviews Dr. Robert Malone, who was previously banned from Twitter for repeatedly posting misinformation about COVID-19. A group of 270 medical professionals published an open letter stating that Rogan had a history of spring “false and socially harmful assertions” about the virus.