The World record breaking Indie band, Pocket Gods, are tackling music streaming platforms face-on with their documentary ‘The 30 Second Song Movie’.
The documentary explores the extremely low royalties musicians earn per stream, where just £0.002 was paid out per Spotify stream for ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’. In a bid to confront this system, the Pocket Gods utilised Spotify’s policy for paying royalties for songs that run for a minimum of 30 seconds, thus creating a total of 10 albums, each including 1000 songs with a duration of half a minute.
This campaign was finalised with the release of a more typical album in terms of song duration, but rare in the fact that only one copy is available. On sale at a local record shop in St Albans for £1 million, the band have set their sights on using the album’s profits to fund an ethical streaming service which will pay £0.1 per stream: 50x Spotify’s rate.
The film is available to watch via YouTube and Vimeo, after being removed from Prime Video for unknown reasons.