Forget crowdfunding, the hair-brained scheme by a Los Angeles funk band to scam streaming music giant Spotify to fund their tour has paid off. In the tens of thousands.
You might remember funk band Vulfpeck, the LA group who last March hatched a clever PR and fundraising stunt by uploading an album of complete silence to Spotify. Designed to be streamed while listeners were sleeping, the cheekily titled Sleepify contained 10 tracks (named ‘Z’ through to ‘Zzzzzzzzzz’) of total silence at five minutes total running time.
Why would anyone want to listen to an album with zero music? Because, as Vulfpeck frontman Jack Stratton explained in a video detailing the scheme, each time one of the tracks is streamed the band gets 0.0005 cents towards funding their US tour. “Listen to Sleepify all night on repeat,” Stratton explained, “you’d generate $4,” from the 96 repeated streams over the course of an average eight hours of rest per night.
That means Vulfpeck’s fund-raising LP needed to be streamed 4 million times to reach their end-goal of $20,000. “I’m proposing that if you steam Sleepify, on repeat when you sleep every night, we will be able to tour without charging admission,” Stratton said. “Also, we’re going to base the routing of the Sleepify tour on where Sleepify is happening the most. Never in the history of music has it been so easy to support a band’s tour.” “It now looks like both Vulfpeck and their dedicated sleepers have gotten their wish and not only that, but the band broke their $20k end-goal.”
It now looks like both Vulfpeck and their dedicated sleepers have gotten their wish and not only that, but the band broke their $20k figure, reaching a final tally of just over $30,000 from more than 5.4 million streams, as Consequence Of Sound reports.
But that’s not the whole tale.
Spotify originally didn’t seem too concerned with Vulfpeck’s Sleepify venture, even playing along in the press with spokesman Graham James applauding the “clever stunt”, adding “but we prefer Vulfpeck’s earlier albums. Sleepify seems derivative of John Cage’s work.” (Ho, ho.)
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
They even emailed the band with a friendly offer to help, as Billboard details, but once the stunt picked up steam, Spotify were no longer playful. By late April, Stratton says the group received a notice to remove Sleepify for violating terms-of-service only for Spotify to delete the album themselves when Vulfpeck did not acquiesce to demands.
“I’m genuinely surprised they took it down,” Stratton tells Billboard. “Or at least at the timing – that they waited instead of doing it immediately. It maybe would have reflected better on them if they did it right away instead of getting all this press first.” “I think [Spotify] panicked when they realized someone was actually making money from the music.”
Vulfpeck’s hilarious response to the Sleepify takedown? Uploading an EP to Spotify titled Official Statement, a three track release that describes the removal request in a spoken word piece (‘#Hurt’), 30 seconds of silence (‘#Reflect’), and a keyboard ditty (‘Parted Sea (Strong Pesach)’). The EP hasn’t yet been removed – meaning you can stream it here and still get Vulfpeck more royalties.
So following the takedown, will the band actually get the $30,000-ish they gamed from the streaming juggernaut? Stratton believes they will, but the tour is “still up in the air” until payday arrives, sometime in May given that Spotify usually pays two months after a track is streamed.
“I don’t see it as a misuse at all,” Stratton tells Billboard of the Sleepify concept, “I see it as an art piece — or something.” He’s also happy to take Spotify’s money considering the attention on what is widely regarded by the musical fraternity as a broken business model with a middling to poor royalty scheme. “They’ve set up this economy where they get 30 percent and [content owners] get 70 percent, and surprise, the payout is very low,” adds Stratton.
In a further interview with VICE, Stratton speculates “I think [Spotify] panicked when they realized someone was actually making money from the music.” Spotify’s takedown may have also been due to the worry that other, bigger bands may pick up on a concept similar to Sleepify – after all, it’s fair game.
Vulfpeck has a modest fanbase – around 1,670 twitter followers and nearly 7,000 Facebook fans – but what if a band with an online fandom in the millions pulled the same stunt? Sending Spotify bankrupt for a royalties paycheque of millions of dollars would only be the beginning of that hypothetical shitstorm.
