Joanna Newsom: "Spotify Is the Banana of the Music Industry. It Just Gives Off a Fume"

Joanna Newsom: "Spotify Is the Banana of the Music Industry. It Just Gives Off a Fume"

Photo by Annabel Mehran

Joanna Newsom has strongly criticized Spotify, calling it a “cynical and musician-hating system” and “the banana of the music industry.” “It just gives off a fume. You can just smell that something’s wrong with it,” she said in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times

Newsom, whose music is not available on streaming services (except for Pandora), said Spotify “is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists.”

While she said she saw the appeal of streaming services from a listener’s perspective (“It’s a genius idea”), her problems stem from Spotify’s low payouts. “[The labels] can make their money from advertising and subscription, and they don’t have to pay their artists anything for that,” she said. “So it’s set up in a way that they can just rob their artists, and most of their artists have no way to fight it because they’re contractually obligated to stay with the label for x amount of time and you can’t really opt out. It’s a garbage system.”

Newsom pointed out Tidal as a service trying to do something different. “I know it was kind of roundly made fun of because of the way in which it was unveiled to the world, but from what I gather they were trying to address the issues that make Spotify so very evil,” she said. “I don’t know if they successfully did it. I should look into it.”

She concluded: “I understand why Spotify is great. I wish there was a way to provide the service they provide and have nobody lose, nobody be victimized by that.”

Divers, Newsom’s new album, is out October 23 via Drag City.

Revisit the video for “Sapokanikan”, which was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson:

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