Inside Vulfpeck’s Spotify Stunt | Hacker News Reader

Inside Vulfpeck’s Spotify Stunt

billboard.com

40 pointsRKoutnik24 comments

While it's an interesting idea it will come at the detriment to other musicians using the platform. Spotify's payouts are largely based on subscriber's monthly fees divided over the total number of plays for a month (to get price per play), then multiplied by the number of plays an artist gets. This means that as people flood to play the silent songs, other artists who actually use the platform to share audible music are making less money. If they want to crowdsource a free concert tour they should make a Kickstarter/Indiegogo and sell shirts or autographed paraphernalia.

Refer to the "Royalties: in detail" section: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#spotifys-pr...

It's a gag meant to get attention and poke fun at Spotify's royalty scheme. If anything, it's to other musicians' benefit because it makes a point: Spotify is of so little value to individual musicians that they're willing to thumb their noses at it for publicity.

On what are you basing your statement that Spotify has little value to musicians?

For example, the link in the comment you replied to has some numbers showing the difference in value between a Spotify music listener and a non-Spotify music listener in the US. From such numbers, and others at that site, it seems like the opposite should be true.

This strikes me as the audio equivalent of click fraud. Someone is paying for that silence...

Agreed.. I can't imagine Spotify are happy about this!

“This is a clever stunt, but we prefer Vulpeck’s earlier albums,” said Spotify spokesman Graham James. “'Sleepify' seems derivative of John Cage’s work.”

I don't think they care, at this stage anyway. And probably never -- it doesn't scale as well as click fraud.

At Spotify royalty rates it's cheap publicity.

Equivalent of click fraud would be paying people in Africa etc $.0005 / track to listen to your Spotify silent tracks.

Won't somebody think of the recording industry?

I might participate if I didn't just unsubscribe from Spotify. (That's what happens when you send me ads by push notification, especially when I pay for your app.)

You can turn off all the push notifications.

But the point is that an ad was sent via a system not intended for ads, and arguably against what is advertised if this was a paid subscription.

I've never had an ad pushed to my iPhone, iPad, or the 3 computers I regularly use spotify on since I subscribed over a year ago. The push notifications from the app are all related to sending you new album releases and other artists you listen to on the site, if you enable them. Sounds like above is pebcak.

Great now spotify is going to want my heart rate information to figure out if I am asleep or awake while listening.

That is actually totally possible! How nuts. As soon as the iWatch/Ring/Hairband has an SDK..

I was going to say "over my dead body" but then they'll detect when a user dies eventually and somehow monetize and leverage that.

Automatically generated tribute songs based on the likes of the deceased. Plugged in with facebook to provide images and generating a tribute video with audio and video. Build it as an online service for sending sympathy e-cards.

I liked Spotify's response ("derivative of John Gage"). Has Spotify stopped streaming audio ads between songs on the free service? Pretty easy to go back to that if this became a real problem.

Somehow I doubt Spotify's advertisers would agree with this fix. If Spotify knows that people fake-listening to streams is a problem[1], then they'd be ill-advised to try to get money from advertisers for those fake listeners.

[1] not that I believe this problem will get big enough that Spotify even remotely gives a shit. Their answer was actually pretty excellent: laugh along with the joke, knowing that this is likely not going to start happening a lot.

"Should Vulfpeck’s brilliant stunt materialize into a completely free tour for fans, it could change the way independent artists regard streaming services and fan engagement."

How? If more bands make albums like these, services like Spotify will refuse to carry them. This is a one time deal. Regardless, any band could ask its listeners to stream its music on mute.

I wonder what is the conversion rate between the amount electricity used vs. the amount of royalty payments generated. Perhaps it might just be easier to straight up donate to this guy.

Well, it depends on the device used and whether you left it on just for the music.

Let's say you left a Macbook Air (2011) on playing the album. It has a 50 watt-hour battery, which lasts 7 hours, so it uses ~0.12 watt-hour/minute. Since the album has ten tracks of around 30s, that's 5 minutes * 0.12 Wh/m, so ~0.6 watt-hour in total.

The average price of residential electricity in the US is 11.72c/kWh (Dec. 2013), so that ends up at around $0.00007/album.

Since he says he gets $0.005/listen, or $0.025/album, that's still significantly profitable.

If you're one of those people who leaves the smartphone on anyway, the cost would probably be negligible.

Of course, it probably wouldn't matter anyway since the fixed transaction costs would make it unreasonable to send so small donations.

Nice publicity stunt, never having heard of these guys before, im now listening through their albums on Spotify, love it.

It's a self-limiting hack which squeals the friction between musicians and the new techno-gatekeepers.

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