"T Swift won the battle, but musicians are losing the war." Ohm and Sport, the band that founded and owns the website Eternify, tweeted on June 23. Quite clearly, the website's name is referenced to Spotify, the music streaming site and app which garnered some flak following Taylor Swift's pulling out of all her songs in her latest album from it late last year.
Arguably the biggest music streaming service online, Spotify gives the artists on its streaming list a meager $0.005 per play. To count as a play, the track has to be streamed for at least thirty seconds. Swift had a much-publicized snubbing of another notable free music-streaming service, Apple Music, recently, apparently in protest of how artists are compensated by such services on a trial period.
The Eternify founders created the Spotify hack, which streams 30-second loops of artists's songs, to help musicians earn "rightful" compensation. The site claims that it will let users "stream your favorite artists forever" as it supposedly does even while in mute mode. With this, the user will not have to hear the stream repeatedly.
The more counted streams, the more earnings, without having to get tired of the track. The Ohm and Sport band itself has a single available on Spotify. Citing that the streaming service does little to nothing for "the vast number of small artists on whom these services depend," the band resolved to use Eternify to change the situation for much smaller artists who have their music on Spotify, lured by false hopes of just compensation from these streaming services.
Thus, according to Business Insider report, Spotify has released a statement claiming they are currently looking into the site and to quote, "We welcome any legitimate means to help artists get their music discovered in Spotify and to be fairly compensated. With this in mind, we're currently trying to contact Eternify to check that their app follows Spotify's terms of use."
As of writing, Eternify has not released any statement in response to this, and Spotify similarly has not spoken of any new developments on the issue, too.
