World record-breaking indie band The Pocket Gods have had their documentary, The 30 Second Song Movie removed by Amazon from its Prime Video. The documentary, which focuses on the minuscule amount of royalties paid to artists from streaming services, was removed on 11th March from Amazon’s platform without any notice or reason given after the fact.
“We’ve spent the last year making our documentary on music streaming and our campaign for fair royalties so we were excited when the film was picked up in January by Amazon Prime Video,” says vocalist Mark Christopher Lee, “but we still don’t know the reasons why – all they have told us is that is does not fit their content guidelines, despite it passing all their guidelines in January, so not sure what has changed.”.
The film chronicles the band’s David vs Goliath journey against the music streaming services, due to Spotify paying out just £0.002 per stream after buying The Joe Rogan Experience (the previous rate being £0.007 p/s).
With Spotify paying out royalties on songs that run for at least 30 seconds, The Pocket Gods have created 10 albums, each with 100 songs 30 seconds long. The band have through their campaign to an end with one final album of more typical duration with only one copy made, for sale exclusively on vinyl in a local record shop in St Albans for £1m.
With the money raised from their efforts, The Pocket Gods will fund an ethical alternative to the major DSPs that pays 1p per stream – 50 times Spotify’s current rate. Their antics have caught the attention of BBC News and Sky News and have got them meetings with Spotify founder Daniel Ek and the company’s head of nusic.
While no reason has been given for the film’s removal from Amazon Video, it is worth noting that Amazon also owns and operates its own music streaming platform, Amazon Music.
“We are passionate about this issue and we thank Amazon for their initial interest but, as we want to get the message out there to as many people as possible, we are making the film available for free via our Youtube and Vimeo channels. We want to continue the debate and we hope the film helps with this and goes towards creating a better future for artists and songwriters.”
Watch The 30 Second Song Movie here:
