Funk Band Used Spotify to Generate $20K From Album with No Sound

Just came across this story and thought “WOW, this was a genius idea.” One funk band from Ann Arbor, Michigan figured out a way to utilize Spotify’s streaming service to raise money for their upcoming tour.

The band, Vulfpek, created an album called Sleepify, which consisted of 10 songs of complete silence. Each song was up to 32 seconds long and created for the purpose of continuous streaming. Vulfpek asked there fans to stream the album overnight, repeatedly so that they could produce enough royalties to help them go on tour.

The company itself admitted last year that it only pays out $0.007 for each track, which sounds rubbish at first. But that means we’re only looking at 100 streams of a track to make 70 cents, or about 143 streams to make a dollar. Sleepify will get through 10 streams in just over five minutes. So if a fan slept for seven hours (plus some added time for the extra one or two seconds on each track) and streamed the album for the whole time, they’d play 840 tracks, generating $5.88 for Vulfpeck. If you can convince one hundred fans to do the same, that works out at $588 per night royalties – and that’s assuming each listener only has one playable device and only streams through the night (if they let it play all through the day, Vulfpeck’s earnings could be more than tripled). You could, with willing fans, make a load of money from this scheme. (The Guardian)

Check out the album below: