Eternify tool puts Spotify songs on endless repeat to let artists make more money

App plays a song for the 30 seconds required for it to count as a listen — and then starts it all over again

General atmosphere view at Spotify presents An Intimate Evening With Shane McAnally at the Rosewall on November 2, 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee (Jason Davis/Getty Images)

A band has made a special app to allow people to endlessly repeat albums so that they can make money from them on Spotify.

Eternify lets people listen to a song for the 30 seconds required to count as a listen, and then starts it all over again. The team behind it hope that users will leave the work of their favourite artists playing using it, muting it while their account isn’t in use, in an attempt to make more money from the site.

Artists get between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play on Spotify, which many have described as far too low. The tool aims to offset that by helping people generate many more plays, increasing their revenues.

Eternify was made by US-based ambient pop band, Ohm and Sport, to coincide with its first album. But it can be used with any artist — users choose who they want to listen to and are then given the loop, with the tool showing how much time and money has been accrued during the listening.

Spotify told the BBC that it was exploring whether the app broke its terms of service, and it most likely did. The same reasoning was used to shut down a similar trick last year, when a band made a five-minute album of silence named ‘Sleepify’ that users could leave streaming to help them make money to fund a tour.