While public opinion on Spotify has wavered in recent weeks, from an investor perspective, things are looking good, with its latest earnings report showing that active users grew 18 percent year-on-year for Q4 2021.

That said Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, has had to address the controversy surrounding Joe Rogan, his podcast, misinformation policies and what this could mean in coming quarters.

Ek shared his thoughts in the aforementioned earnings report, noting that the platform finds itself in a delicate balancing act.

“We’re trying to balance creative expression with the safety of our users, and of course, this is a very complicated issue,” he explained during the Q&A portion of the earnings call.

As The Verge points out, the Spotify CEO was also careful to stress that it is still too early to tell if there will be any lasting fallout as a result of the Joe Rogan controversy.

Ek also reiterated that Spotify would push ahead with its plan to label podcast episodes that discuss COVID-19 with a disclaimer, but specifically wanted to highlight the fact that Joe Rogan is not the sole podcaster on its platform and that advertisers have several other podcasts available to them.

That said, it should be noted that Rogan’s podcast is first in an estimated 90 markets across the globe. As such, while there are as many as 50 million creators earmarked to join the platform by the Spotify CEO, the fact that its top podcast creator proves so divisive and controversial, should prove telling.

Either way, it looks like Spotify has entered the same territory as YouTube and Facebook in terms of needing to better police the content its creators upload. Whether it can do a better job than those two, remains to be seen.

“We want to be the best place for audio creators. We’ve only scratched the surface of the creative potential in audio,” concluded Ek.

[Image – Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash]