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Spotify has agreed to change its playlist rules after indie band The Pocket Gods released an album of 1,000 30-second songs on the site as a protest against the streaming platform’s pay fees.
The tech company under fire has come under fire for paying artists as little as £0.002 for each streaming ‘play’.
Royalties are only triggered if a song is listened to for 30 seconds.
Now Spotify has called “peace talks” with cult group The Pocket Gods, after a I article led thousands of listeners to his album, 1000×30 – No one makes money anymore.
The St Albans wrote and recorded 1,000 songs, each over 30 seconds long, and uploaded the album to Spotify.
The band said they had been inspired by a 2015 article on I written by music teacher Mike Errico titled: “How streaming is changing everything we know about making music”.
“I saw the article and it made me think, ‘Why write longer songs when we get paid so little for only 30 seconds?’” said frontman Mark Christopher Lee.
“It’s a ‘job to rule’ to raise awareness on behalf of all artists, musicians and songwriters.”
The album has clocked 600,000 streams, prompting Spotify founder Daniel Ek to contact Lee, who was invited to a meeting with the platform’s head of artist relations.
Lee said, “Spotify said that we are ahead of the curve as shorter songs are the future, just check out TikTok. They said I can release 30 second tracks to their playlists (chart boosters) for their consideration; I couldn’t do this before because the songs were considered too short.
“So next week I’m going to release a 30-second single called Noel Gallagher is jealous of my studio..”
Lee said he was told songwriter pay rates would increase when the company implements an increase in their subscriptions, currently £9.99 per month for its Premium service.
The article “made the issues go viral, which is great.” Lee is asking Adele, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift to join the protest by also releasing 30-second songs, an outcome Spotify wanted to avoid.
Spotify is currently being boycotted by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others who have removed their music from the platform in protest of anti-vaccine misinformation shared on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
The booming streaming market is currently the subject of an investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority after a scathing report by MPs said the dominant model of music consumption only benefited record companies, Spotify and the superstars.
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