A message to the Spotify musician The Passionate & Objective Jokerfan (aka Matt Farley)

"A Song About The Thong" is the end of the world

ps why tf am I still listening to this

i don't use spotify and what is this?

he's a dude with a piano who has hundreds (371 songs, 10 hours) of tribute songs on Spotify, with titles like "People Like Townes Van Zandt Even More Because of His Addictions" and "A Review of 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'"? so whenever you search for certain artists or albums or songs, you get his blathering novelty songs alongside (or instead of) whatever you were actually trying to search for.

So you get all these heartbroken Beastie Boys fans searching Spotify for "Adam Yauch" and coming up with

oh MCA, oh MCA
you are a Beastie Boy
you're such a good rapper
oh MCA, oh your name is Adam Yauch
that is your name

either he has a major Wesley Willis complex or he's trying to jam up people's search results. probably a little of both.

seems like a guy who writes piano music mostly inspired by titles of popular songs (tiny dancer, big yellow taxi, fireworks, heartless, etc) in a kinda half-outsider half-'comedy' style

see this is why i don't use Spotify.

Although I totally get and encourage this guy's steez. It's no different from those shitty acappellas, badly-recorded live versions and euro-techno remixes that jam Spotify up all the time anyway.

Something kind of Anal Cunt-ish about this idea as well as Wesley Willis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjilCmhokqc

ok so maybe I was cynical to peg him as a troll/spammer. and he's (kinda) from my area. sorry dude, not tryna be a hater!

I use Spotify every day and I've never heard of this guy.

*performs an impromptu piano ballad called "Matt Farley, You Are a Good Guy & I'm Sorry If I Hurt Your Feelings"*

I wish I thought of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI-xltxyiKI

"Gangman Style" is pretty dope.

this guy is about 20 times more prolific than I thought! which is scary, almost. as the sole member of his street team, I'll do a roundup of his many side projects:

The Singing Animal Lover: in which he like all different kinds of animals ("Never Assume Cats are Girls and Dogs are Boys" is a legit jam)

The Toilet Bowl Cleaners: in which he goes all scatological (this is his most successful act, and "Poop Song" may be his biggest Spotify hit)

Papa Razzi and the Photogs, in which he wants celebrities to notice him

The Singing Film Critic

Moes Haven, his proper indie folk band

The Hungry Food Band

Those Crazy College Kids

The Extreme Left Wing Liberals

The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities and Towns

The Farley Flower Band

The Strange Man Who Sings About Dead Animals

The Paranormal Song Warrior

The Vampire & Werewolf Experience

The Manchvegas Outlaw Society

The MA Love Song Warriors

The Athletic Sports Band (but also The Green Bay & Milwaukee Sports Band, The Philadelphia Sports Band, The Boston Baseball Band, and so on, and so on)

sometimes he just plugs a word or name into a pre-recorded song, as with The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over and The Prom Song Singers. this is not his best work, imho.

http://archives.hippopress.com/music/nite070104a.html

“We’ve had 22 albums with very little success. Nobody really listens to us. Partly because we’re just constantly writing music and not really performing anywhere. Plus, we’ve got a lot of material and a lot of it’s pretty bad,” Matt Farley said.

Fulfilling a plan to record 30 minutes of music every day, they’ve produced an album for each month of the year. Which means they’ve created 365 tracks and 12 albums for 2006, each titled after the month it was released.

“It’s exhausting, as you can imagine. We subscribe to the theory that if you write a thousand songs, maybe five of them will be good, so we write several thousands of songs,” Farley said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJj-88vSNN0

FIVE songs about jandek

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/tldr-hundred-songs/

lol: "the most recent album is like my Pet Sounds of poop songs...it's intense, it's beautiful".

I was surprised when he said he made $23,000 last year, considering that he said in this article (from 2007) that he only made enough per month "to buy a pizza, not including a tip". he must make almost all of his money off of Spotify plays and almost none of it off of iTunes purchases (i.e. there are only maybe 5 people in the world who would be willing to spend $0.99 on "Poop Into a Wormhole", but hundreds of thousands of people get hi every weekend and search for "poop" on Spotify). dude comes across less as a canny SEO spammer and more as an intense, earnest hobbyist who won't stop until he's recorded ALL THE SONGS ABOUT EVERYTHING...which doesn't make his music any more listenable, but I admire him for the effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5msl69tE9E

only one song about Lucia Pamela? this is an outrage!!!

he must make almost all of his money off of Spotify plays and almost none of it off of iTunes purchases

guess I was wrong about that:

http://noisey.vice.com/en_se/read/youneedtohearthisthis-guy-made-23000-by-releasing-14000-songs-on-itunes-and-spotify

How many Spotify plays did you have last year, and how much did that earn you?

I don't know exactly, but I think it's around 1.3 million streams just on Spotify, which is about $5,000. I also earn a similar rate from other streaming services like Rhapsody.

Do you sell many downloads?

Yes. I still make more of my money from downloads than from streams. But streaming is catching up. It's about 60% from downloads lately.

So how much do you make annually from your music?
I earned $23,500 in 2013 from all my music sales. My music is on every digital music store and people are actually purchasing these songs, not just streaming them.

also lol:

I put the most work into the Toilet Bowl Cleaners albums. The most recent album is called “You Thought We Ran Out of Poop Song Ideas. You Were Wrong”. If you get beyond the fact that I'm singing about poop, you'll notice that the songs are actually good.

That's quite reassuring to hear. A few years ago I had an email correspondence with him and I mentioned that I was disappointed that the then latest Toilet Bowl Cleaners album sounded as phoned-in as some of him other projects, which he ackowledged

my 93-hour Spotify playlist of Motern Media releases

(in the interest of quality control, it excludes all his cut & paste "Happy Birthday [Jared]/[Jeremy]/[Jason]/[James]" songs)

Matt Farley's own playlist (at the bottom of this page) is only 11 hours long — a "greatest hits" of sorts

kind of obsessed with his work as 'The Guy Who Sings Songs about Cities & Towns'

Gangman Style is kinda nice. don't think i need to listen to this ever again tho'
I am glad this guy exists and yes, i too wish I had thought of this first
go with god matt farley

I really like hsi daniel johnston song

I thought of him for some reason

whatta trol

what's his Daniel Johnston song?

I haven't watched any of his other movies but Freaky Farley is one of the best/worst horror films ever made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbwB8H5XvZ

er

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbwB8H5XvZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQuoOKtdZo

True or false: Matt Farley writes 20 songs a day and has digitally distributed more than 14,000 in six years. We need creative outliers like him and a neutral internet to support them

I came across this the other day and it changed my perspective on what music can be: https://open.spotify.com/album/5f3Hq48zGa6ADfxxgzD2eE?si=VxIu-EaeRGykX5R4Ytxp3A

Cover version of a Matt Farley song me and some friends made in the style of The Modern Lovers / The Yummy Fur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHEeW-5Nvfc&t=0s&list=UUWlBnszJrJhwWCAHEh6YgmQ&index=12

so easy to make so many songs tehse days- in the past it cost money to record! now its so cheap and then you can publish it all on the werld wibe web

I wish I thought of this
― MUBU gai pan (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, August 6, 2012