Over the weekend, Crosby – while retweeting messages applauding Joni Mitchell’s Spotify takedown, as well as those carrying the hashtag #IStandWithNeilYoung – was sparring with his fans on Twitter. Which is exactly the situation David Crosby now finds himself in. Obviously enough, making a request for Spotify to remove an artist’s work gets even more complicated if that artist has sold their rights (particularly their master rights) to another party. Yet they are generally powerless to do so until their distributor/record label carries out the deed for them. Crosby?Īn artist can demand to have their music removed from Spotify all they like.

The important takeaway from all of this, before we come onto Mr.

Mitchell’s ’80s albums – originally signed to Geffen, and now distributed by Universal Music Group (UMG) – remain on Spotify as of today (January 30), suggesting that either UMG hasn’t yet made an official demand for the service to remove these albums or, if it has, that Spotify hasn’t yet acted upon it. Warner – just like it did for Neil Young – has evidently carried out this task for Joni Mitchell. In the US, typically the only entity that can request to Spotify that the platform remove a record from its service is that record’s label/distributor. As MBW reported yesterday, by 3am ET on Saturday (January 29), all of Mitchell’s classic albums distributed by Warner Music Group (including Blue, Clouds, For The Roses, and Court And Spark) had been removed on Spotify.

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