According to a number of sources, The Pocket Gods, a band from St. Albans has announced that it plans to release a 1,000-track album of 30-second songs in protest of Spotify‘s royalty rates.
Why 30 seconds? The under-fire streaming service’s model means that a single stream of a song, and the revenue that brings in, is activated after just 30 seconds of airtime.
The Pocket Gods have decided to release a new album of songs that are all around the 30-second mark, inspired by an article in the i by New York-based music professor Mike Errico, who said that Spotify’s methods surrounding what constitutes a stream could signal the end of the three-minute pop song.
“I saw the article, and it made me think, ‘Why write longer songs when we get paid little enough for just 30 seconds?’,” The Pocket Gods frontman Mark Christopher Lee told i News.
The new album – 1000×30 – Nobody Makes Money Anymore – directly references Spotify’s business model, and as such Lee says that it means the band “run the risk of being thrown off the platform.”
He added: “We wrote and recorded 1,000 songs, each a shade over 30 seconds long for the album. The longest is 36 seconds. It is designed to raise awareness about the campaign for fair royalty rates.”
Speaking of one particular song called “0.002” – the amount of money they receive per stream – Lee said: “We used to get 0.007p a play, still a pittance, but that seems to have been cut since Spotify bought the Joe Rogan Experience podcast for $100m.”
