What can a little bit of ingenuity and crowdfunding can do? Well apparently earn your band $20,000 from Spotify! Whether or not this move is brilliant or just a band cheating the system is for you to decide. But for now, Indie band Vulfpeck has managed to game Spotify, the billion-dollar music giant.

Spotify has long been trying to ditch the perception that it skimps on royalties. It pays on average around $0.07 each time an artist’s song is streamed by its users. In March, Vulfpeck decided to fund it’s entire tour through Spotify. Their latest album Sleepify consists of 10 songs that are completely silent.

Spotify requires a song to have played for at least 30 seconds to register as played so of course every song in this album is at least 31 to 32 seconds long. And as bandleader Jack Stratton explains in the promo video below, Vulfpeck plans to have a tour where every show will be free to the public.

In order to achieve their goal though, fans were asked to stream the silent Sleepify album on repeat while asleep so that Vulfpeck could slowly but steadily get their payout.

This nifty scheme has come to an end though, as Spotify has asked Vulfpeck to remove their album, citing that this violates the company’s terms of content. Claims that the band has been banned from Spotify are unfounded as the band’s other music is still on Spotify.

As retaliation, Vulfpeck have put on another ‘album’ called Official Statement which includes a track called #Hurt. The second track in this album is to help fans reflect on the situation with a 31 second track of total silence (!!).

What do you think of this little stunt? Brilliant or just blatantly abusing a loophole?

Comments are closed.