It turns out that there are many ways to game the technology that powers streaming music services. Take the case of a funk band called Vulfpeck.
In March 2014, they uploaded an album called Sleepify to Spotify. It consisted of ten tracks. Each was 30 seconds long, and each “song” was totally silent. Vulfpeck encouraged fans to stream the album on repeat when they went to bed each night. This way, every “play” of each “song” earned a tiny fraction of a cent in royalties. A good guess is that seven hours of overnight streaming resulted in almost six dollars in profit.
Within a month, Vulfpeck earned almost $20,000 through 5.5 million “plays.” That’s when Spotify—which initially thought this was pretty clever—pulled the album on some suddenly discovered content violations.
Vulfpeck used the profits to tour six cities in the US where the tickets cost zero.
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