Last year, Tone Deaf recounted the tale of Vulfpeck, a then-little known Swedish indie funk group who decided they were going to cheat the Spotify system by releasing an album of absolute silence.
The plan was admittedly inspired. The band would release the album and then urge fans to stream it as they sleep. Spotify would do the rest of the work, depositing royalty payments into the band’s account as the streams racked up.
Vulfpeck were hoping to use the funds to finance a string of free shows for their fans, but after Spotify officials uncovered their plan (it wasn’t hard, everyone from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork wrote about it), they deep-sixed their grand scheme.
It’s arguably the most famous case of a band rigging the Spotify system, but acclaimed cult outfit The Pocket Gods are about to create a very close second. They have their own scheme and it may just be administrator-proof.
As Journalism.co.uk reports, The Pocket Gods recently unveiled a new album titled 100 X 30. It’s a fitting title, the album consists of exactly 100 songs and each track runs for exactly 30 seconds in length.
Why 30 seconds? Well, because Spotify only pays out a royalty when a song has been streaming for that long. If a user switches a song off before it hits that 30-second mark, royalty payments don’t kick in.
The band have effectively recorded an album with 100 royalty-optimised songs, with an approximate running time of your average album length. It’s really quite ingenious, but it’s also a protest against the streaming industry.
However, as is becoming increasingly clear, the issue with streaming has less to do with the streaming services themselves than with the record labels who negotiated the royalty rates streamers are forced to pay.
