Sleepify

Sleepify is an album by the American funk band Vulfpeck, released March 2014. The release consists solely of ten roughly 30-second-long tracks of silence. The album was made available on the music streaming service Spotify, where the band encouraged consumers to play the album on a loop while they slept. In turn, royalties from the playing of each track on the "album" were to be used to crowdfund a free concert tour by the band. The album was pulled by Spotify on April 26, 2014, citing violations of the service's content policies. It was estimated that the band would be able to collect at least US$20,000 in royalty payments from streams of Sleepify, although it was unclear if the band would receive the money. In July 2014, Billboard reported that the band received royalties totalling $19,655 plus an anticipated $1,100 forthcoming, and that the band was in the process of organizing a tour. In August, Vulfpeck announced the admission-free Sleepify Tour in the United States scheduled for September 2014. The album exposed a loophole in Spotify's royalty calculation model. In March 2015, band founder Jack Stratton proposed a more equitable model for Spotify payout distribution in which each artist's payout is based solely on that artist's listeners, rather than every listener using the service.