
Inside Vulfpeck’s Spotify Stunt - RKoutnik
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/touring/5937612/inside-vulfpecks-brilliant-spotify-stunt
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amckenna
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...](http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#spotifys-progress-so-
far)

~~~
hamburglar
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.

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mzl
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.

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DougN7
This strikes me as the audio equivalent of click fraud. Someone is paying for
that silence...

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

~~~
morsch
_“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.

~~~
notahacker
At Spotify royalty rates it's cheap publicity.

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koenigdavidmj
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.)

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Aqwis
You can turn off all the push notifications.

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sologoub
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.

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res0nat0r
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.

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

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

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ballard
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.

~~~
navs
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.

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nl
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.

~~~
hamburglar
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.

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joesmo
"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.

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branchan
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.

~~~
icebraining
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.

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

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

