Do you want to support your favorite musicians, but do so without spending any money and without actually listening to their songs? A band came up with a brilliant scheme to extract as much royalty cash from Spotify for your favorite musicians in the shortest amount of time. It’s called Eternify, and it renders your favorite songs unlistenable.

The musicians who came up with this evil plan, Ohm & Sport, obviously know how Spotify works quite well. They know that the artist gets a royalty payment after you play a song for 30 seconds, so what the Eternify app does is play 30-second sections over and over. If a song is 4 minutes long, you can rack up eight plays in the same amount of time that it would have taken you to actually listen to the song.

While finishing this post, I’ve let the program run in a different tab while it plays the same 30-second section of “Code Monkey” by Jonathan Coulton over and over.

The secret of Eternify seems to be that you are not supposed to actually listen to the music, just run them over and over in a background tab with your computer’s sound turned off. Otherwise you will grow to hate your favorite artists and songs. Very quickly.

This app hasn’t been shut down by Spotify yet, but we do wonder how long it will last. Last year, the band Vulfpeck released an entire album intended for fans to stream on Spotify while they slept or at any other time of day. The tracks were silent. Spotify appreciated the band’s ingenuity, but took the track down.

In a statement about Eternify, Spotify told Business Insider that they want to get in touch with the band to discuss the app.

We welcome any legitimate means to help artists get their music discovered in Spotify and to be fairly compensated. With this in mind, we’re currently trying to contact Eternify to check that their app follows Spotify’s terms of use.

Another musician, Disparition, begs fans not to use Eternify. While you might feel helpful, you are not really helping your favorite artists. There’s only a limited pool for royalties every month that comes from advertising and subscription revenue, and it’s divided among artists according to how often their songs have ben played that month.

“When you use an app like this, it has zero affect on the amount of money Spotify makes,” he explains. “[Y]ou are just diluting the pool of money that goes to all of the other artists in the system.

There are, of course, other ways to support your favorite musicians without leaving your couch. You could, for example, check whether your favorite independent artist has a page on Bandcamp, which lets you name your own price or pay extra for an album or single if you want to. That does involve putting up money and not just leaving a browser window open.

Eternify [Official Site]
This band’s website loops Spotify songs to rack up payments for musicians [Business Insider]
ETERNIFY [Tumblr]

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