I was absolutely stunned when Spotify did the Joe Rogan deal. You could already tell at that point that he was a divisive kind of person and I just couldn't understand why anyone would want that headache. I was already wondering how YouTube was going to deal with him and even joked to people I knew that the staff at YouTube were probably high fiving each other and planning a big party as soon as they heard the news.
And more than that, like Howard Stern before, some of his popularity comes from that edginess. So it's both the thing people came for, and the thing others are trying to get away from.
