Two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee David Crosby has died, according to Variety and Rolling Stone.

In a statement, his wife said Crosby died surrounded by family.

"Although he is no longer here with us, his humanity and kind soul will continue to guide and inspire us. His legacy will continue to live on through his legendary music," his wife said in the statement obtained by Variety.

Crosby's cause of death has not been disclosed.

His career spanned six decades. Crosby is the founding member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

He's considered a folk rock pioneer, having collaborated with artists including Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Elton John.

Crosby released a live solo album for the first time in November 2022.

In addition to his music, Crosby wasn't shy about expressing his political views. His most recent posts on social media praise climate advocate Greta Thunberg.

Crosby was 81 years old.

Neil Young vs Joe Rogan seems like the strangest of cultural clashes.

Yet the 76-year-old rock star's protest over coronavirus-related content on Rogan's popular Spotify podcast has ignited a hot debate over misinformation and free speech, bruising a streaming service that has become the central way that millions of people around the world experience music.

"Rockin' in the Free World"? Not on Spotify. Not anymore. Here's what's going on.

Why is Young upset?

His protest came after dozens of doctors and scientists wrote an open letter to Spotify, complaining about Rogan's decision to have a podcast discussion with Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious disease specialist who has been banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation on COVID-19. Malone has become a hero in the anti-vaccination community.

Saying Spotify was complicit in spreading misinformation, Young told the company that it could have his music or Rogan's podcast — "not both." Spotify agreed to remove his music from the service.

Is the protest spreading?

Slowly. Joni Mitchell said she was standing in solidarity and also asked for her music to be removed. So did Nils Lofgren, a guitarist who plays in one of Young's backing bands, Crazy Horse, and also with Bruce Springsteen. Podcaster Brene Brown also said she was halting new podcasts without saying exactly why.

The rock band Belly put the message "Delete Spotify" in the background of its Spotify page, but you could still stream their music. Pulling music off Spotify isn't necessarily easy — often it's the record company, not the artist, who controls that.

Spotify dominates the marketplace. It had 31% of the 524 million worldwide music stream subscriptions in the second quarter of 2021, more than double that of second-place Apple Music, according to Midia Research. Spotify is not always popular with musicians, many of whom complain that it doesn't pay them enough for their work.

"Spotify has a huge amount of cultural capital that is itself power," says Midia Research's Mark Mulligan. "And that is what at risk if more artists essentially tried to push their fans to other places."

While losing Young and Mitchell may be a psychic blow, what would really matter is if a more current artist takes up the cause. Everyone in Spotify's top 10 list of most-streamed artists, led by Drake's 44 billion, are from past the turn of the century, with the possible exception of Eminem, who first became popular in 1999.

For those artists, and for Spotify, taking a stand like Young's would have much more serious financial consequences.

Why choose Rogan over Young?

Music accounts for the vast majority of Spotify's revenue, but Rogan represents its future.

Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million to license Rogan's podcast, its most popular. He's the centerpiece of the company's strategy to become an audio company rather than just a music company. In the long term, Spotify has more control over potential revenue from podcasts than it does for music, Mulligan says.

The Swedish company is gunning to be the premiere podcasting platform, investing hundreds of millions of dollars since 2019 to buy podcast companies like Gimlet and Anchor, and sign top hosts like Rogan and Dax Shepard.

Spotify was set to overtake Apple last year as the biggest podcast platform in the United States, the world's largest market, by number of listeners, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Popular podcasters, particularly the outspoken ones, are likely to be watching this protest very closely to see if Spotify will stick up for the right to speak freely.

What is Spotify doing to quiet the protests?

The company announced that it would add a warning before all podcasts that discuss COVID-19, directing listeners to factual information on the pandemic from scientists and public health experts. It did not discuss Rogan specifically.

Spotify has shown more transparency in the past few days than it ever has about how it deals with questionable content, and the new policy is a good first step, says John Wihbey, a Northeastern University professor and specialist in emerging technologies.

Yet it's not clear that anyone has effectively dealt with the issue of misinformation spread through podcasts, Wihbey says. Will Rogan's audience actually listen to an advisory and then hunt down other COVID-19 information?

"This could be just window-dressing," he says.

Rogan spoke publicly for the first time late Sunday, saying he's sorry his critics feel the way they do, and it wasn't his intention to upset anyone or spread misinformation. He said he likes to have conversations with people who offer different perspectives, and said that some things once considered misinformation — that cloth masks were not good at protecting against COVID-19, for example — are now accepted.

But he said he could do a better job having people who dispute controversial opinions like Malone's on faster so his listeners will hear the different perspective.

The calculus for Spotify can change if the protest snowballs, says Colin Stutz, news director at Billboard magazine. "I think they just ride this out and hope that it goes away," he said.

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Associated Press correspondents Kristin M. Hall and Tali Arbel contributed to this report.

Neil Young thanked his record label for standing with him after he decided to pull his music from Spotify over his stance on COVID-19.

"Before I told my friends at Warner Bros about my desire to leave the SPOTIFY platform, I was reminded by my own legal forces that contractually I did not have the control of my music to do that," Young said.

"I want to thank my truly great and supportive record company Warner Brothers - Reprise Records, for standing with me in my decision to pull all my music from Spotify," he added.

On Tuesday, Young wrote a letter to his managers and record label to remove his music from Spotify because of COVID-19 misinformation from "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, which it hosts on the platform.

“They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both," the 76-year-old rocker said in his now-deleted letter.

Spotify began the process of removing Young's music on Wednesday.

"SPOTIFY has become the home of life threatening COVID misinformation. Lies being sold for money," he said.

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, the streaming platform said they "have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic."

They added that they "regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon."

However, it doesn't appear Young will be returning to Spotify. In fact, he's encouraging other artists to remove their music from the platform.

"I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies will move off the SPOTIFY platform and stop supporting SPOTIFY’s deadly misinformation about COVID," he said.

Spotify is not joking around amid a dispute over royalties for comedy content. The streaming giant has removed the work of hundreds of comedians from its platform -- including Tiffany Haddish, Kevin Hart and the late Robin Williams -- according to rights agency Spoken Giants.

Spoken Giants, which represents some of the affected comedians, describes itself as "the first global rights administration company for the owners and creators of spoken word copyrights," and aims to get streaming platforms to pay comedians for writing jokes in the same way songwriters are paid.

The group told CNN that the take-down happened Nov. 24, and said that it never requested the content's removal.

"Unfortunately, Spotify removed the work of individual comedians rather than continue to negotiate," CEO Jim King told CNN.

"With this take-down, individual comedians are now being penalized for collectively requesting the same compensation songwriters receive," he added. "After Spotify removed our members' work, we reached out but have not received a response. We have now requested an immediate meeting to resolve this situation."

A Spotify spokesperson told CNN that the streaming platform had already paid "significant amounts of money" to offer the comedy content to listeners, and "would love to continue to do so."

"However, given that Spoken Giants is disputing what rights various licensors have, it's imperative that the labels that distribute this content, Spotify and Spoken Giants come together to resolve this issue to ensure this content remains available to fans around the globe," the spokesperson said.

Although the content is still available on other platforms including Pandora and Sirius, Spoken Giants said comedians with lower profiles and revenues could suffer from losing Spotify as a platform.

On social media, New York-based comedian Joe Zimmerman called the move "corporate bullying." Another New York-based comedian, Liz Miele, tweeted that her albums had also been removed from the platform because comedians "had the audacity to ask for money owed to us," and jokingly compared herself to singer Taylor Swift.

Swift was previously engaged in a dispute with Spotify, arguing artists were not paid enough. The singer pulled her entire catalog from the platform in 2014 but reversed her decision in 2017.