How to Get Spotify to Pay for Your Entire Tour…

Not only can Spotify pay for your tour, but all of your fans will get in free.   Sound impossible?  This is the story of how one band figured it all out.

More groundbreaking innovations at vulfpeck.com.

11 Responses

    • Jeff Robinson

      Yeah, funny, but not true. Spotify has a threshold limit on how many spins they pay for. You can only stream an artist X amount of times per day, or per week, or per month for the band to get paid. Any streams beyond that threshold and they are wasted streams that pay nothing. You can’t stream the artist infinitely and expect them to get paid for every spin.

      Part of the logic of having such ridiculously low royalty rates is that it’s not worth the time to stream. Otherwise, what artist machine (management, lawyers, labels, etc.) wouldn’t stream their music constantly to generate income? A label could set up hundreds of interns with a IP spoofing software add-on and get unique streams generated for their artists.

      Or maybe, like the charts, just pay the middleman to get those spins without actually having to stream the songs…wait, would the cost of paying the middleman be off-set by the royalty rate? Maybe the price of the middleman has come down to scale?

      Maybe things have gotten better in the music industry!

      • David

        Do you know what the limit is? Presumably it is quite high, otherwise some legitimate streams would be invalidated. For example, I can imagine a keen teen fan of Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift playing their latest warbles at least 20 times a day.

        • Jeff Robinson

          David, early on, I believe Spotify had a 5-stream limit that would count under the free service. It could be the subscriber tier allows for more daily streams of the same song to be paid.

  1. David

    I assume this was intended as a satire, but some people seem to be taking it seriously – the ‘Sleepify’ tracks have had over 100,000 plays.

    So it has to be pointed out that the band are not ripping off Spotify (which I could live with), but other artists. Since artists in total are paid a share of total Spotify revenue, any artists who game the system to get more than their proper share of revenue (i.e. based on the number of full-length tracks people actually listen to) are taking it from other artists, not from Spotify. I trust that someone will gently point this out to them.

  2. Dry Roasted

    This is completely exploitative of Daniel Ek and Goldman Sachs.

  3. Jeff Robinson

    Okay, let me say this, the genius is putting silence- which costs nothing to record- up as ‘product’ to generate income. Let me suggest that short silence might be even more of a money-maker. Instead of ten 4-minute streams of silence, why not eighty :30 second streams? I’m not aware that length of song has anything to do with the royalty rate Spotify pays- which is unlike over-the-air broadcast radio, which does indeed pay based on length of song aired.

    • JTVDigital

      I guess that’s what he did, 31 sec “songs”

      • Jeff Robinson

        John Cage released silence years ago- if someone now posts clips of silence, is there copyright infringement? Somebody should be getting their lawyers in line. If mass amounts of artists start releasing silence as the ‘new’ music, what will the ensuing restrictions mean?