It’s probably never been easier to make money from music. Sure, you still have to have ideas yourself, and a little bit of equipment. But you don’t necessarily need a label.
Sometimes the idea doesn’t even have to be particularly original: The Sleep Fruits label by Dutch producer Stef Van Vugt offers relaxation and sleep music on Spotify. Atmospheric sounds, the noise of the rain – these tracks are heard hundreds of thousands of times. Almost every “song” is exactly 31 seconds long. What is not noticeable when listening, thanks to Spotify’s seamless playback, follows a calculation: From 30 seconds, songs can be monetized on the streaming platform.
If the songs are shorter, the performers will not be involved in the payout cake. This is to prevent that a lot of money can be made very quickly with a number of ultra-short tracks. 31 seconds is the limit of audacity.
If you fall asleep to the noises of rain – let’s say eight hours – streams almost 1,000 tracks in one night. The head of the US music marketing agency Venture Music, Dustin Boyer, told the USRolling Stone, that is “extremely immoral”. The Spotify model is thereby exploited. This is because the income is divided “pro rata” – analogously to the stream shares of the artists. For example, if someone only streams Rihanna, their money not only goes to her and her label, but also to everyone.
The musician and artist Valentin Hansen reversed the 31-second trick. His album Crisis – The Worthless Album consists exclusively of songs that are less than 30 seconds long. So, as can be seen in the title, it is monetarily worthless. A few weeks ago he also demonstrated this visually in a gallery in Berlin-Kreuzberg: Several smartphones streamed the 30 – incidentally, very pleasant – tracks on the album and didn’t generate a cent. His idea shows impressively how music is still influenced by quite arbitrary format limits. If the 12-inch record used to dictate the length of the album to a certain extent, the 30-second limit now sets minimum requirements. Hansen also illustrates how easy it is to manipulate the flow of money.
Incidentally, an alternative model would be the “user-centric”, the user-related model. This means that the users’ money only goes to those whose music is streamed by them. Spotify has so far excluded this model. According to our own studies, it is not worth it. We will clarify why this is so in one of the following columns.
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