This album has been reproduced millions of times in Spotify but has not generated absolutely no benefit

‘Crisis (The Worthless Album)’ by Valentin Hansen It is not, of course, a normal album. Because Hansen is not a normal musician. It is rather A performative artist that he plotted this conceptual album with a single objective: not generating benefit, not leaving a trace on Spotify, demonstrating how absurd streaming They are getting used to us.

30 songs. In 2021, the artist based in Berlin Valentin Hansen launched this ‘crisis (The Worthless Album)’ which consisted of 30 tracks, all of them of 29 seconds. Why this duration? He stayed for a second to monetize them, generate Royalties or to be registered in the metrics of the platform, according to the rules of use of the platform. But here comes the amazing: he used a smartphones hacked to reproduce the album countless times. And demonstrate that it would not even generate benefits.

A design issue. As They count on contemporary100‘Crisis (The Worthless Album)’ won zero euros in total, but “not by accident, but for a matter of pure design.” Its purpose was to generate exactly that benefit. It’s about a criticism of the economy of streamingwhere an artist earns $ 0.004 per reproduction, but algorithms favor mainstreamto what is already established purely economic interests, which falls into a very complicated mousetrap to make profitable. “I want to show how broken the system is,” Hansen said about his experiment.

Real songs. Hansen is a real musician. It makes a self -conscious and hyperproduced indie (in fact, ‘crisis’ has eight real songs, only that the tracks are interrupted every 29 seconds, as has been said, thus starting each song in three or four pieces impossible to make profitable) and, in fact, ‘crisis’ arose as a reaction to its most popular song, ‘Killing a Friend’, after 1,7 million reproductions, only got 2,000 euros. Hence the criticism of the Spotify payment system: said in an interview than the initiative Bandcamp Fridayin which the platform gives all its income to artists, is the most reasonable way to make money with music in streaming.

Other experiments in Spotify. It is not the first attempt to play with Spotify’s legal possibilities and vericuetos: Royalties). All completely silent. The band encouraged their followers to reproduce the album in continuous repetition while they slept, generating royalties. The goal? Finance with that money a tour of free concerts. And it worked: in seven weeks and after about 5.5 million views, ‘Sleepify’ generated $ 20,000.

Of course, Spotify did not like this sympathetic hairmade and eliminated the album of its platform, adducing violations of its content policies and commenting that, as an effect of the media impact of ‘Sleepify’, they had received a large number of silent albums. Spotify ended up modifying its legal section, prohibiting issues in full in silence.

Spotify mandates. For what Hansen’s experiment serves is to talk about the absolute dominance of Spotify in the industry and how unfair it is, therefore, that he has so much power and can decide how artists are rewarded and in what terms. And how that benefits the platformbut not to musicians. Therefore, it is important that in the face of the propaganda that Spotify is democratizing and verticalizing musicdiscordant voices such as Hansen still dare to denounce an unfair situation with artists.

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