This band's website loops Spotify songs to rack up payments for musicians
Eternify.itEternify is a Spotify hack that wants its artists to earn their "rightful" paychecks by allowing users to "stream their favorite artists forever."
The website plays 30-second loops of music from artists with a live counter at the bottom that shows the amount of money the listener made for the artist. With each half a minute loop, the user can earn $.005 for an artist.
It's a clever wrinkle to the ongoing debate about musician compensation in the age of streaming music, though it may violate Spotify's user guidelines. Spotify's terms and conditions prohibit "artificially increasing play count or otherwise manipulating the Services by using a script or other automated process".
Eternify is fueled by Ohm & Sport, a band whose official website claims is "the world's first band in beta". Their single, Air Tonight, is still available to stream on Spotify as of now.
Ohm and Sport's first tweet on June 22 said:
"We're launching Eternify in the wake of numerous false promises of a better future for streaming: Not a single one of these announcements or apparent victories have had any meaningful impact on the vast number of small artists on whom these services depend," said the band to The Verge.
Previous attempts to hack into Spotify's artist payout model led the music streaming service to take action. Indie funk outfit Vulfpeck released a silent album called "Sleepify" so that the band could rack up money as its listeners went to sleep with it streaming on Spotify. They wanted to fund free shows for their upcoming tour. According to Billboard, Spotify decided to take "Sleepify" down after contacting Vulfpeck a few times.
Spotify reached out with a statement regarding Eternify: "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."