About 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast mysteriously disappeared from Spotify on Friday, JREMissing.com found, according to The Verge. JREMissing.com is a web tool for tracking missing shows.
The show (and Spotify’s relationship with it) has faced heavy criticism over the past few weeks, but there’s no clear connection to the missing show, nor any direct apparent connection to the removed show.
Since streaming giant Spotify reportedly paid $100 million for “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020, Spotify has been the show’s exclusive platform, and Rogan’s show has been accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines (and many other things), making it greatly affected.
Musicians such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and India Arie have taken their music off the platform in protest, while Rogan himself has apologized to Spotify for the controversy (while defending his show).
Spotify has deleted two of my @joerogan appearances pic.twitter.com/ZjKu8TUgcO
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) February 4, 2022
Spotify has also dealt with the controversy, making its content moderation policies public and holding a tense town hall meeting to defend the company’s relationship with Rogan to employees.
All of these are reasons why some shows are missing without seeming to have any explanation, which is just a bit of a bizarre phenomenon. (To be clear, the show has more than 1,700 episodes.)
A spot-check of JREMissing.com data by The Verge shows that these shows are indeed no longer on Spotify, even though they were made available to users last year.
Spotify did not immediately respond to requests from The Verge about why the shows were removed. Joe Rogan also didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.