One of the new ways for musicians to make money these days is by letting music streaming services, such as Spotify, play their songs for them. Of course this is assuming that their songs are even being played, but that’s a different story. Now apparently Spotify pays out $0.007 each time a song is streamed, meaning that it has to be streamed many times and by many people if the artist/band hopes to make anything substantial.
Well one band called Vulfpeck managed to “game” the system by uploading an album that comprises of several silent tracks. Each track is about half a minute in length and plays entirely no music at all. Now the band wasn’t trying to scam Spotify, but were rather using the service to help them raise money for a tour. They asked their fans to stream the album, Sleepify, while they slept in hopes that the end results would be a nice chunk of change.
Turns out that it was and they have managed to raise $20,000 in royalties, but unfortunately Spotify caught on to their practices and have since removed the album from their listing. According to Spotify, this violates their terms of content, which is understandable, although according to the band’s keyboardist, Jack Stratton, Spotify wasn’t all too offended and actually found the idea funny and clever. The only problem was that it went against their terms of content and well, rules are rules.
The profits made from Spotify thus far will be used to help fund the band’s tour where they will be heading on over to the cities that streamed the band’s album the most. They have also mentioned that the concert itself will be free to attend, so it’s good to know that they’re doing this for the music, as opposed to trying to cash in as much as they can.
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