[youtube]http://youtu.be/KXvncV79LXk[/youtube]
This is more of a music industry related post, but it’s also kind of brilliant. You might be aware that artists make royalties off of Spotify, which is basically $0.007 each time a track is streamed and really doesn’t sound like much. However, A funk band named Vulfpeck from Ann Arbor Michigan has figured out a way to gain enough royalties from Spotify to fund a tour.
Here’s how it works: Vulfpeck released an album called Sleepify, which consists of ten tracks each basically composed of 31-32 seconds of complete silence (tracks need to be played for at least 30 seconds to register) The band has asked fans to listen to the album on repeat while sleeping so as to generate money for their tour. Again, it doesn’t sound like the band would make much money off of this, but (credit to The Guardian for working out the math on this) if you consider the fact that a ten track album that is five minutes long is being played for about seven hours, that’s about 840 tracks played which comes out to $5.88. Still doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s because it’s just one person. If one hundred fans did this, it would equal out to $588, which is quite awesome.
You can stream the album below if you’re curious. It doesn’t sound like much of anything, on account of it isn’t. That said, it’s still better than some of the stuff we write about. We like the track titles, too. It’ll be interesting to see if any other band pick up on this particular business move and/or if Spotify moves to ban this.
