Neil Young has found a novel way to tell Donald Trump to get his hands off Greenland: he’s giving the country his entire discography for free and yanking it out of Jeff Bezos’ ecosystem in the process. It’s a protest gesture that will almost certainly fly right past its target—there is no universe in which Trump is sitting around spinning After the Gold Rush and reconsidering imperialism—but, you know, it’s the thought that counts, and all that.
In a new post on Neil Young Archives, the 80-year-old songwriter announced that every one of the roughly 57,000 residents of Greenland can claim free, high‑res access to his entire catalogue and film archive, with the offer renewable “as long as you are in Greenland”—essentially turning his subscription site into a perpetual gift for a place Trump has spent the last month treating like a prize on the world’s crudest game show.
This isn’t a token sampler, either; the archives include virtually everything he’s recorded over the last 62 years, streamed in the high-resolution audio he’s spent a decade haranguing the industry to take seriously. Normally, that access runs from about $24.99 to $99.99 a year, depending on the tier you choose, which means Young is, in concrete terms, handing an entire country the keys to his life’s work. The gesture is explicitly framed as a pressure valve: Young says he hopes his “Music and Music Films will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government,” a line that lands somewhere between hippie benediction and diplomatic side‑eye.
This is all in response to the U.S. president’s obsession with Greenland, which has only grown more pathological and dangerous in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, he floated taking Greenland by force and threatened tariffs against European countries that objected, only backing down after NATO allies started moving troops around like chess pieces. The annexation fantasy may have been “dropped for now,” but as Young seems to understand, the walk‑backs never get as much oxygen as the threats themselves. So he’s doing the one thing he can control: weaponizing his catalog. On one side, he’s flinging the door open for a small population caught in the blast radius of imperial cosplay; on the other, he’s slamming it shut on Amazon Music, which he (rightly) calls an arm of a “billionaire backer of the president.”
Young first pledged in October to pull his music from Amazon’s streaming service, and his new letter makes clear he intends to follow through, describing Bezos’ support for Trump and ICE as something he “cannot ignore” and flatly promising his songs “will never be available on Amazon, as long as it is owned by Bezos.” Coming from a guy who already pulled his music from Spotify over Joe Rogan’s COVID misinformation, only to reluctantly return when the show spread to every major platform, this is evidently just the latest iteration of a specific project: using distribution itself as a moral lever.
After all, Young’s Greenland letter is just the latest entry in a years-long, slightly chaotic but remarkably consistent anti-Trump project that has used every advantage available to him: lawsuits, boycotts, and now the megaphone of his own art. He sued Trump in 2020 for playing “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Devil’s Sidewalk” at rallies without permission, calling the campaign “divisive” and “un-American” and then voluntarily dismissing the suit once the point—“stop using my songs as your theme music”—had been made. In recent weeks, he’s aimed his fire at ICE after agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, under circumstances that had nothing to do with immigration enforcement and everything to do with the agency’s impunity. He’s described ICE’s operations there as “the biggest mess I’ve ever witnessed” and written of Trump that “every move he makes is to build instability so he can stay in power,” a diagnosis that tracks neatly with the Greenland fiasco: create a crisis, float annexation, then quietly “resolve” the chaos you engineered.
These moves are inconvenient and not particularly tidy for his label, which he admits will take a hit—but Young’s doing it anyway, because, as he wrote, “I think the message I am sending is important and clear.” And it is: if the U.S. government menaces a country, he will give that country his art. If your platform bankrolls the guy doing the menacing, he’ll take it away. It is, in its own slightly cranky way, a very Neil Young move: stubborn, imperfect, uncompromising, and rooted in the belief that music is not neutral—that who gets to hear it, and who gets to profit from it, are political decisions whether artists admit it or not.
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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