Joanna Newsom remains the unwavering OG of Spotify boycotters
Since their marriage in 2013, the unlikely pairing of goofball comedian Andy Samberg and his wife, the harp-playing indie-folk genius Joanna Newsom, has left onlookers both confused and delighted.
Sure, the subject matter of Samberg’s music with The Lonely Island, with tunes like ‘Sushi Glory Hole’ and ‘Dick in a Box’, seems practically antithetical to Newsom’s dense, poetic, and deadly serious style of songwriting, but there’s always been a charm in that contrast.
One can’t help but picture Newsom in one room of their Hollywood home, painstakingly crafting every intricate string pluck and eloquent animal reference for her next album; the one her fans have been patiently waiting for since 2015’s Divers. Meanwhile, there’s Samberg in the next room, 47 years old but still beat-boxing with his buddies and trying to come up with a funny rhyme for “butt cheeks.” It seems like the perfect marriage, really.
“It’s amazing,” Samberg recently told fellow comedian Amy Poehler on her podcast, claiming his relationship with Newsom still feels like a fun sleepover with his best friend, “There’s no one I’d rather be hanging out and chatting with. I feel really lucky to get to share my life with her.”
Adorable, yes, but still, if we wanted to be real bastards and throw a spanner into the works of this fairy tale, we could ask Samberg why he doesn’t love his wife quite enough to remove his own music from Spotify in solidarity with her. In reality, of course, that decision is probably completely out of Samberg’s hands, considering that the Lonely Island is a complicated entity with ties to major record labels, film projects, Saturday Night Live, and various other corporate interests. Joanna Newsom, meanwhile, has put out all her records on the fiercely independent Chicago label Drag City, who’ve long supported the decision she made over a decade ago to not participate with streamers that, in her eyes, didn’t treat artists fairly.
While there have been some brief and mostly unimpressive rebellions against Spotify in recent years, such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell temporarily pulling their music off the platform in 2022, or Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor doing so last year, very few artists on the name recognition level of Joanna Newsom have done what she has done; firmly holding her position and refusing to put any of her music on the streamer, year after year, despite the consequences.
Newsom was very direct and clear about her original rationale, too, calling Spotify a “cynical and musician-hating system” in a 2015 interview with the LA Times. “[It’s] the banana of the music industry,” she said, “It just gives off a fume. You can just smell that something’s wrong with it. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists. [The labels] can make their money from advertising and subscription, and they don’t have to pay their artists anything for that. 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’s boycott was a big enough deal that it inspired a direct response from Spotify in 2015, with one of the company’s execs offering to speak with her personally and explain why she was mistaken in her understanding of the business model. Apparently, though, since her full discography remains absent from Spotify all these years later, that argument was not convincing.
Being disgruntled about Spotify’s payouts to artists isn’t unique, of course. The fact that Joanna Newsom chose to take a stand about it, however, and has stuck with that decision to the likely detriment of her own career, is a very rare thing indeed. No wonder Samberg is still so smitten; it’s not every day you meet a genuine artist with rock-solid principles.
To date, the only result when you search Newsom’s name on Spotify, hilariously, is the 2011 version of ‘The Muppet Show’ theme song, on which she apparently provided one of the voices.
