When Joe Rogan revealed YouTube's "weird shenanigans" that forced his Spotify switch

In the 1599th edition of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) with Tulsi Gabbard, podcast host Joe Rogan revealed that he left YouTube for Spotify because of concerns regarding censorship.

The UFC commentator stated that he chose to cross over to the Swedish music streaming service because they had a vested interest in him succeeding while YouTube was attempting to censor him by demonetizing content they didn't approve:

“It’s one of the reasons why I went to Spotify. It’s because they had a vested interest in me succeeding. Like, instead of worrying about me being pulled from their network. It’s not that I never really worried about that with YouTube. But it’s always possible, and there were some weird shenanigans they would do with demonetizing specific episodes just randomly."

Listen to the full podcast below:

He explained that the often ambiguous demonitisation threat was a shrewd way of censoring without implementing strict censorship rules. He also told to the former congresswoman that, YouTube in the past, has demonetiezed several JRE episodes for bizarre reasons like swearing on the podcast and discussing about Covid-19:

“It’s a way of censoring people without censoring people. Because you say, oh, were you guys talking about Covid? Oh yeah, you know, we can’t put ads on that... Oh, did you guys swear? did you swear? Oh yeah, we’re going to have to demonetize that. There was a lot of weird stuff like that”

But it would seem as though everything is smooth sailing for Joe Rogan over at Spotify. Since the 2020 acquisition of the JRE podcast, the Swedish media streaming service has in fact censored the podcast host.

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Spotify removes several Joe Rogan Experience episodes

Right after the $100 million multi-year licensing of the JRE, Spotify removed about 40 of the podcast's episodes. This first slew of removals saw segments featuring right-wing personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes weeded out.

The Swedish company further removed an additional 70 JRE episodes from the platform after Joe Rogan came under fire for using racial slurs on the podcast and for spreading misinformation regarding Covid-19.

Although Spotify executives did not comment on why the episodes were yanked, the removals happened after music artists like India Arie threatened to pull their songs from the platform owing to Rogan using the N-word several times on JRE.

Later in a video uploaded to his Instagram, the UFC commentator apologized for using the racial slur and spreading misinformation. He even admitted that he was misinformed and did not do his research on the topic thoroughly.