The latest digital platform on the receiving end of a Neil Young boycott is Amazon, with the musician pledging to remove his recordings from Amazon Music “soon”, while urging his fans to “forget Amazon” and instead “buy local”.
The boycott was announced in a blog post last week in which Young tells fans to forget Amazon and the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, seemingly because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been sucking up a bit too much to Donald Trump since he returned to the White House at the start of the year.
“Bezos supports this government”, Young writes, before adding, “it does not support you or me. The time is here. Forget Amazon. Soon my music will not be there. It is easy to buy local. Support your community. Go to the local store”.
Neil Young previously had a high profile bust up with Spotify, of course, over its podcasts – and especially the then Spotify exclusive Joe Rogan podcast – spreading misinformation about the COVID pandemic.
That led to Young pulling his music from Spotify, despite the streaming service announcing new measures to get better at monitoring podcast content on its platform. His music returned to Spotify two years later after it ended its exclusivity deal with Rogan.
More recently Young criticised Facebook and Instagram owner Meta after a controversy over its policies around AI. As a result, Warner Music’s Reprise Records, which managed a Neil Young Facebook page, announced it would no longer be promoting his music via the platform.
Of course, there have been various controversies regarding Amazon’s practices over the years, but none of those prompted a Neil Young boycott. Indeed, back in 2020, Young was bigging up Amazon’s music streaming service because at the time it was pushing higher quality audio much more than many of its competitors, and higher quality audio has long been a passion of the musician.
It seems to be Bezos more closely aligning himself with Trump during the second Trump presidency that has prompted Young to become publicly anti-Amazon. His blog post last week continues, “Don’t go back to the big corporations who have sold out America. We all have to give up something to save America from the Corporate Control Age it is entering. They need you to buy from them. Don’t”.
