Five months after pulling their music off Spotify, Crosby, Stills, & Nash have returned to the streaming service, according to Billboard. The group — including Neil Young — requested their labels officially remove their music back in February in protest of popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who slammed Covid protocols, mask mandates, and the effectiveness of vaccine and booster shots.
At the time, CSN issued a statement saying, “We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify’s Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences. Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don’t want our music — or the music we made together — to be on the same platform.”
As it stands now, CSN plan to donate proceeds from their streams to Covid-19 charities for at least a month. Although Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young material is back on the service — no Neil Young-written tracks are available to stream, either as part of the group nor on his own.
Graham Nash, like his bandmates, has never been happy with the lack of compensation they've received from digital sales. He told us that musicians predicted the digital revolution long before their record companies recognized it, by which time it was too late. Nash told us that it serves the record companies right for being so slow in understanding and embracing the new technology: “We tried to tell the record companies that this digital revolution was coming and they took no notice of anybody, and so got stuck behind the 8-ball. And record companies, like, the big, y'know, CBS and Warner Brothers and all. . . don't exist anymore. They don't want physical product. They want it all to be a digital download.”
Graham Nash kicks off his next string of dates on July 13th at Red Bank, New Jersey's Count Basie Center for the Arts.