Sleepify
| Sleepify | ||||
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| Studio album by Vulfpeck | ||||
| Released | March 2014 | |||
| Length | 5:16 | |||
| Label | Vulf Records | |||
| Producer | Jack Stratton | |||
| Vulfpeck chronology | ||||
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Sleepify is an album by the funk band Vulfpeck. The release does not contain any audible music, and consisted solely of ten, roughly 30-second-long tracks of silence; the album was made available on the music streaming service Spotify, where the band encouraged consumers to play the album on a loop while they slept. In turn, royalties from the playing of each track on the "album" were to be used to crowdfund a free concert tour by the band.
The album was pulled by Spotify on April 26, 2014, citing violations of the service's content policies. It was estimated that the band would be able to collect at least US$20,000 in royalty payments from streams of Sleepify, although it was unclear if the band would receive the money. In July 2014, Billboard reported that the band received royalties totalling $19,655 plus an anticipated $1,100 forthcoming, and that the band was in the process of organizing a tour. In August, Vulfpeck announced the admission-free Sleepify Tour in the United States scheduled for September 2014.
The album exposed a loophole in Spotify's royalty calculation model. In March 2015, band founder Jack Stratton proposed a more equitable model for Spotify payout distribution in which each artist's payout is solely based on the revenue associated with that artist's listeners, and not the overall revenue.
Vulfpeck released Sleepify in March 2014 as a means to fund a concert tour of the same name; all of the shows were to be free of charge, but funded solely using royalty payments from the album on the music streaming service Spotify. The service calculates royalties based on how many times a track has been played, counting a single play as listening to the song for at least 30 seconds. As such, all of the tracks on Sleepify are just over thirty seconds in length, and consist solely of silence; a promotional video for the album jokingly labeled it as "the most silent album ever recorded". The band encouraged fans to stream the album on a loop overnight while they were sleeping (hence the name); with each stream costing US$0.007, The Guardian estimated that streaming the album for seven hours would accumulate $5.88 in royalty payments over 840 streams, and 100 people doing the same with one device each would accumulate $588 in payments.
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