Indie label Drag City and Joanna Newsom’s very understandable former aversion to streaming services — particularly Spotify — also meant that if one’s C.D. player, or turntable (or, sure, computer-with-iTunes-album-downloads) broke, they’d be pretty out of luck if they wanted a convenient way to listen to a Newsom (or Bill Callahan, or Silver Jews, etc.) album. Which, of course, was… just the way it went 10 years ago. But now that we’ve been spoiled by the immediacy of all things, the lack of easy access to, say, gorgeous and vertiginously-existential-harp-ballads has likely weighed on fans.
As Pitchfork noted a little while back, select works of Newsom’s began showing up on Apple Music, as her label Drag City began uploading their musicians’ work onto the service on a one-year-per-day basis. And now, her whole discography is available on the streaming service.
Joanna Newsom, like Jay-Z — a frequent comparison, btw — is still not available on Spotify. In a 2015 interview in the L.A. Times, Newsom equated Spotify to “a villainous cabal of major labels,” saying “the business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists.”
However, she made clear that she wasn’t against streaming in theory, and rather called it a “genius idea” from a listeners’ perspective, mentioning that “if it wasn’t such a cynical and musician-hating system, I would be all for it.”