Musician Earned $27,000 Last Year Making SEO’d Songs

Not many people would argue that fringe musician Matt Farley is a good songwriter – his track “Ryan Gosling, You Are a Great Singer and Actor. Will You Be My Friend” [sic] features the lyric, You were in The Notebook/It is such a great movie/When girls watch it they cry – and yet he made $27,000 from his music in 2014. How? By applying the principals of search engine optimisation (SEO) to his songwriting.

“I realized people will type weird stuff into search engines, and there’s not always songs for the stuff,” Farley said. “If you search for ‘love’ on iTunes or Spotify, you’re going to get something like 15 million songs. If you search ‘monkey,’ you’re going to get fewer.”

It was this SEO-inspired approach that bore such celebrity-focused fare as, “Amanda Knox Is Not Guilty,” “Music Writer Mark Richardson Blocked Me On Twitter,” and “Mike Daisey, Why You Gotta Tell Lies To Ira Glass?”. Farley even released a 92-song album about office supplies.

The prolific Farley records around 50 songs a week, and boasts a back-catalogue of 16,000 songs to date. All are available on iTunes and Spotify, under various different band names and pseudonyms. He hopes one day to pack in his day job – working at a group home for teens – to record music full-time.

Source: Wired