Missing Joe Rogan Episodes Were Left Out on Spotify’s Request

In a recent Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) episode, Rogan has confirmed that past episodes which had not been transferred over to Spotify upon his deal with the platform in September last year were intentionally omitted because Spotify “didn’t want” to host those episodes. Rogan suggested that this had not been an important issue for him and that he has not been restricted in any way by Spotify when it comes to future content.

The host of the world’s most popular podcast signed a deal with Spotify in 2020, in which all Rogan’s future episodes would be available exclusively on Spotify, rather than primarily on YouTube, the platform where the JRE had previously enjoyed the most public engagement. The deal also involved transferring all past episodes of the JRE to Spotify and removing them from YouTube. In return for content exclusivity for Spotify, Rogan received over $100 million.

Rogan was criticized for the deal by a large portion of his audience, which saw the move as simply opportunistic and him as having sold out. These concerns were amplified shortly after, when, at the time of Rogan’s platform shift, a number of his older episodes seemed to have been missing from the new Spotify playlist. Those included Rogan’s conversations with several particularly controversial personalities, as well as those where some sensitive topics were discussed - in particular, the issue of transgender identities. Spotify was immediately accused of censoring the JRE, and Rogan of being complicit in the sanitization of his own past associations.

Addressing the rumours, Alex Jones, who has been a long-time friend of Rogan and has repeatedly appeared on his show, made a statement in a video on 1st September 2020, the day of Rogan’s transfer to Spotify, after the news of the missing episodes started coming out:

“Is Spotify censoring the Joe Rogan Podcast? And I didn’t know until I talked to him this morning and he explained it. They’ve got fifteen hundred plus files and then some migrating over; and they’ve had a few problems here and there with corrupted files, with the naming of them. And Spotify wants to have a first rollout and then a second rollout, and here’s the key: Joe Rogan’s favourite one hundred episodes of the last ten years or so will be left on YouTube starting December 31st when he goes exclusively to Spotify. For this couple months’ no man’s land, the content will be on both platforms and will be migrating over. And so that’s why the Alex Jones interview is not there. That’s why some of the other interviews aren’t there. Because those are gonna be the exclusive interviews that are left on YouTube, where, in Joe’s words, they’ll probably get even more views than if they were on Spotify. So that’s what’s happening. And so I asked Joe, who’s always been a straight shooter, point-blank, I said: ‘Is Spotify censoring you?’ And he said: ‘Absolutely not.’”

Rogan himself did not comment on the issue then, neither confirming nor denying Jones’ claims. It is not clear whether Rogan had really spoken to Jones and what exactly had been said.

Jones’ claims have been disputed by many, including Carl Benjamin, who had been a guest on the JRE in one of the episodes not included in the transfer to Spotify. Benjamin said: “My episode with Joe Rogan is definitely not one of his favourites,” citing adverse circumstances surrounding his visit, producing a certain combativeness, which subtracted from the episode’s full potential.

At the time of Rogan’s switch from YouTube to Spotify, some lower-level Spotify employees protested the top-level decision to offer a platform to Rogan, whom they regarded as “transphobic”. In late September, the missing episodes on Spotify were seen by some as concessions made by the company to the employees who disliked some aspects of Rogan’s show. Digital Music News claimed that not hosting those episodes meant “meeting some demands” of the protesting employees.

In episode #1607 of JRE, Rogan has recently commented about corporate culture from his guest Fahim Anwar by addressing the missing episodes.

Anwar: “Anytime anything gets big enough, you’re gonna get s*** like that. There’s gonna be strings attached, you know…”

Rogan: “That’s the criticism of me being on Spotify.”

A: “Yeah, how’s that been? How’s the move been?”

R: “They don’t give a f***, man. They haven’t given me a hard time at all. There’s a few episodes they didn’t want on their platform that I was like: ‘Okay, I don’t care.’ But other than that, in terms of what I do in the future... Like, the big test was having Alex Jones on … and a lot of people were like, you know: ‘They’re telling Joe Rogan what he can do and what he can’t do,’ and I’m like: ‘They’re not, they’re not, and let’s show you.’

After having been silent on Spotify’s involvement for several months, Rogan’s comments on Spotify’s active involvement in the issue of some of his episodes were not expected. The throwaway admission might not have been entirely intentional, as it came after he had had several drinks over the prior almost two hours of the podcast. He has not clarified or added to his statements since.

Although criticised by his audience for his Spotify deal, for Rogan the set-in-stone exclusivity contract might have been a calculated move to keep his show available unchanged to the fullest extent possible. The deal followed a period of intensification in YouTube’s content guidelines and restrictions as well as their enforcement. It was possible that in the future, the JRE could have been selectively censored or interfered with by YouTube in the absence of a fixed contract between the company and Rogan other than YouTube’s general terms of service. In this situation, Rogan might have decided to opt for Spotify’s hosting instead, where his future episodes will, according to him, not be restricted in any way. 

Below is the full list of episodes still missing from Rogan’s Spotify library, compiled by /u/hamiltonk92 and /u/BillBurrFan420 on Reddit. Despite Jones’ insistence in September last year that episodes not transferred to Spotify will be kept on YouTube, at the time of writing of this article, only two of them are available on YouTube - both of them previous appearances of Alex Jones. The remaining 38 missing episodes are not available on either platform. 99 other JRE episodes can still be viewed on YouTube alongside Spotify despite the exclusivity contract, the details of which are not publicly available. The episodes still available on YouTube might, in fact, be Rogan’s “favourites”, but there is hardly any overlap between those and the ones missing from Spotify.