Joe Rogan Apologizes For Racial Slurs As Spotify Removes Over 100 Old Episodes
Spotify has taken down dozens of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience amid the ongoing controversy over the podcast’s spread of COVID misinformation, which has caused artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Nils Lofgren to remove their music from the platform.
The website jremissing.com, which automatically tracks the removal of Joe Rogan Experience episodes in the US by comparing the official Spotify API with a database of all episodes ever released, has detected that 70 episodes suddenly disappeared on Friday.
The episodes in question feature guests including Pete Holmes, Dan Savage, Iliza Shlesinger, Shane Smith, Marc Maron, Amy Schumer, Maynard J Keenan, Bill Burr, Andy Dick, Nick Swardson, Little Esther, Duncan Trussell, and Brian Posehn.
Curiously, none of the episodes removed have anything to do with COVID. The most recent one is from December 2018, well before the pandemic began. It’s unclear if they were pulled due to problematic language or something else.
UPDATE: Joe Rogan has issued an apology after a compilation of him using racial slurs began circulating online and was shared by India Aria, one of the artists who pulled music from Spotify. Meanwhile Engadget reports the total number of deleted Rogan episodes is now 113.
