Folk musician Michelle Shocked is releasing a silent album consisting of songs named after executives in the digital music business, among others, in an effort to raise money for her fall tour.
The album, titled "Inaudible Women," is technically not silent, but includes high-pitched sounds audible to dogs only, as she explains in a
video about the project,
Billboard reported Monday.
"I decided that I was going to make a high album — in fact, the highest album ever made, just so that my friends Spot and Rex can hear it, not audible to human ears," she explains for the camera, "And to raise money for my fall tour."
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The singer's last tour in 2013 didn't go so well. Shocked unleashed an anti-gay tirade from the stage of a San Francisco concert, and subsequently had several of her upcoming host venues cancel their shows and disassociate from her.
Shocked says in her new video that for each stream the songs on her new album get on digital music platforms, she gets a fraction of a cent. She asks her fans to play the album on repeat while they're at work — with no concern, apparently, for the sanity of the dogs forced to listen to it — in an effort to raise money for the upcoming tour. According to her math, for every 300,000 streams, she should be able to play an upcoming show for free.
Her idea is an unoriginal one, cribbed from a campaign promoted earlier this year by Vulfpeck,
Rolling Stone noted Tuesday. In March, Vulfpeck cleverly released a silent album titled "Sleepify" — a nod to streaming music site Spotify.com — raking in roughly $20,000 after asking their fans to stream the album on repeat while they slept.
The album was eventually pulled after Spotify changed its rules, however, and so far Shocked's "Inaudible Women" has not appeared alongside her other albums on the music service.
Among the people named in the album's song titles are SiriusXM exec Patrick Donnelly and Clear Channel's Robert Walls. She also named a track "Chris Willman" after a contributor to Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter who broke the news of her anti-gay comments last year.
"Michelle Shocked has released a new 'song' named after me," Willman wrote in a response on Facebook.
"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."
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