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There is at least one musician who has made Spotify work for him; Matt Farley has shared 14,000 tracks on the streaming service, earning himself a return of over £13,000 per annum for his efforts.
Sadly for everyone, his music isn't very good.
Farley based his strategy for success around the algorithms that Spotify use to supply reccomendations, finding that people were searching for unique words that weren't often incorporated into song titles. As a result he constructs band names and tracks relating to searches and puts out songs optimised to appear in the relevant results.
According to the Guardian, Farley found that songs would encounter more success online if their title included the word 'monkey'. He has also created numerous about cities and their sporting teams in America, a band dedicated to the word sorry (The Sorry Apology Song Person) and a band dedicated to the paranormal (The Paranormal Song Warrior).
Listen to some of Healey's SEO based tracks below
Farley also found that people searched for celebrities a lot on Spotify and as a result created a band called Papa Razzi and the Photogs who make songs about celebrities (this isn't a joke). A simple search for Jon Hamm, Zooey Deschannel or Benidict Cumberbatch will land you in one of these musical bear traps.
Using this method Healey has put out over 14,000 tracks, over 200 albums under 65 artist names. This earns him an income of around £13,000 per annum with 60% of revenue coming directly from downloads and the rest coming from streaming.
