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Spotify has dared disturb the silence by pulling Sleepify, a noiseless album posted to the streaming service by irreverent funkateers Vulfpeck, reports Rolling Stone, which sources Hypebot for the news.
The band explains what happened in a new three-track record entitled Official Statement, which effectively replaced Sleepify on Vulfpeck’s Spotify page. “About five minutes ago, I received an email from Spotify,” one of the band members says in the opening track, “#Hurt.” “The gist of it is while they enjoyed Sleepify and thought it was funny and clever,” he continues, “that it violated their terms of content. They were asking me to take down Sleepify from their service.”
Though “hurt” and “confused,” the band didn’t take The Man’s pesky legal policies lying down: Vulfpeck took 30 seconds of silence (“#Reflect”) to ponder their “moment of uncertainty” and followed it in typically eccentric fashion with a cantor’s keyboard arrangement entitled “Parted Sea (Strong Pesach).”
When Vulfpeck first released Sleepify, Spotify representatives seemed to regard the matter lightly. “This is a clever stunt, but we prefer Vulfpeck’s earlier albums,” said Spotify spokesman Graham James. “Sleepify seems derivative of John Cage’s work.” Perhaps that explains why Cage’s famous silent opus, “4’33”,” can still be found on the streaming music service.
With the revenue generated from Sleepify, which as of earlier this month stood to earn about $18,000 from users streaming the album’s tracks while they slept a grand total of 3.72 million times, Vulfpeck had been hoping to finance a Sleepify tour this fall where every show would be free to the public.
This article first appeared on Billboard.com.
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