Silver and gold

In early 2021, Neil Young sold half of the rights to his back catalogue for $150 million¹. This, conveniently, values the rights to his entire back catalogue at $300 million.

Spotify had non-exclusive, revocable (clearly!), rights to stream that catalogue. Being very optimistic those rights might be worth $30 million: 10% of the value of all the rights to Young's entire catalogue. More realistically they were probably worth single-digit millions of dollars.

In mid 2020, Spotify signed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan for his podcast, for $100 million².

Breaking that contract would have meant Spotify writing off $100 million, against a possible benefit of no more than $30 million: it would have cost them $70 million and probably more.

Young is not stupid: he knew this. He was not trying to force Spotify to drop the Rogan podcast: he was offering them the option to do so, but it was almost certain that they would not take him up on that offer. Once again: all Young is doing is saying that he does not want to share a platform with someone who is spreading anti-scientific nonsense and is, fortunately for him, in a position to make that choice.