As convenient as many of us may find digital music to be, there are plenty of musicians who are less than thrilled about the soaring popularity of music streaming, because of the often ridiculously low payments they get for all those streams. As CBS News reported, Bette Midler recently tweeted that she made less than $115 for more than 4 million streams of her songs.
L.A. funk band Vulfpeck recently made headlines with a clever way to make lemonade from digital lemons: a completely silent album called Sleepify, which it asked fans to stream on repeat as they slept. The band used it as a crowd-sourcing stunt to help fund a free tour, and earned $20,000 from Spotify before the service took it down.
Now now another artist has pulled a similar silent stunt. Controversial singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked has released an album titled Inaudible Women, which as its title implies, is completely inaudible.
Inaudible Women features 11 completely silent tracks, most of which are less than a minute long, named after important figures in the world of digital music, such as Chris Harrison of Pandora, Patrick Donnelly of SiriusXM, and David Drummond of Google. Another person targeted in the album's track listing is journalist Chris Willman, who reported on a homophobic rant made by Shocked at a show in 2013. Upon learning of Shocked's "tribute" to him, Willman took to Facebook and wrote this amusing post:
"Michelle Shocked has released a new "song" named after me. No, I'm not making this up. For better or worse, the track "Chris Willman" consists entirely of silence, just like the other 10 tracks on the album, the rest of which are named after people in the music community (mostly folks on the forefront of digital music and streaming) whom she considers the enemy. Even knowing it was silent, I just spent 99 cents on CDBay to buy "Chris Willman." (It's good, but it's no "Mean.")"
Though humans aren't able to hear the songs on Inaudible Women, Shocked reveals in a video posted to Vimeo that the album was actually recorded for dogs. "I decided that I was going to make a high album - in fact, the highest album ever made," she says while sitting next to her dogs, "just so that my friends Spot and Rex can hear it, not audible to human ears, and to raise money for my fall tour." This scheme worked pretty well for Vulfpeck, so Shocked might be able to pull it off, too.
