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manaskarekar

Off topic but it reminds of the book by Jack Stratton called "How I made $290,000 selling books" priced at $290,000.

Couldn’t find the original listing.

The author is a member of Vulfpeck, pretty fun band.

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...

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Vulpeck also made some noise with their album Sleepify, which was an album of silent tracks they used to game Spotify's pay for plays model. It made them ~$20,000 before Spotify took it down.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...

Epic.

I love malicious compliance in the face of dictatorial companies.

All this ends up doing is decreasing the amount of money going to the artists that people are actually listening to.

That's a funny way of saying fraud. Do you also love companies that send boxes of sawdust or online store customers ?

It's not fraud unless they said that the tracks are not silence.

If I buy sawdust from someone and they send me sawdust, and it's structured so that Amazon pays them some money for it, that's gaming the system, not fraud. Amazon can stop allowing them to do it (just like spotify did).

> If I buy sawdust from someone and they send me sawdust

The validity of your point depends on whether you can demonstrate that people do pay spotify to listen to silence.

My understanding is that people would intentionally put these tracks in their playlist to get periods of silence scheduled ahead of time. If that's not the case, then my original comment was wrong.

> It's not fraud unless they said that the tracks are not silence.

It is fraud, and although IANAL you'd lose in court.

I'd lean copyright infringement? Probably has no audible difference from a John Cage song

Just so you know, copyright infringement does allow independent development to be a valid excuse.

Copyright infringement requires intentional copying without permission, and so if you independently produce the same thing without copying, that thing now has two distinct copyrights.

Patents may be what you're thinking of, as they require zero knowledge nor intent to infringe upon, but patents do not apply to artistic performances.

Then get a computer, get a piano-playing-software, hit 2-3 random notes VERY softly in the beginning & middle & end of each song, and call it a day. No silence. No infringment.

Maybe go learn Esperanto so you can bring joy to the lives of others.

What precedent can you cite to justify your claim?

I think this is more in the vein of Cards Against Humanity shenanigans.

It's a lot more like the fraud attempted in Office Space (... and Superman 3). Spotify artist payments are not based on play counts directly. They are actually based on Spotify's total revenue and the proportion of global Spotify streams that the artist received.

As a result of these extra plays, Vulpeck's stream rate increases, but Spotify gets virtually no extra revenue (especially since a user would have to be a premium subscriber to get a fully quiet experience listening to the album). Vulpeck gets paid a bit more, and everyone else gets paid a minuscule amount less.

For reference, here's one article that mentions this model of how Spotify pays its artists: https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...

Did they not also sell their 10th track as an ad on some album? (not the first with that idea though)

A pre-internet joke on the same topic. An ad in the classifieds advertised "How to make money with classified ads. Send $10 to xxxxxx". Sending $10 got you a letter that said: "Place a classified ad with the text `How to make money with classified ads. Send $10 to xxxxx`"

If you think that's great, you'd love this website:

[How Many People Paid 1 Dollar To See How Many People Paid 1 Dollar](http://www.howmanypeoplepaid1dollartoseehowmanypeoplepaid1do...)

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