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Fortressof Solitude reports that a Silent 10-Minute Track Reaches Top 100 on iTunes:
Released by Samir Rezhami on iTunes, his creation titled “A a a a a Very Good Song” peaked at #44 on the US iTunes chart this past weekend. In addition, the ‘song’ has sold over 5,000 in sales across the world in the four days since its release and is still just hanging on in the top 100 tracks on iTunes in terms of sales. This is a very noteworthy achievement by any means, albeit a rather weird one. So how does a silent song sell a single copy on iTunes, let alone reaching the heights it has?
Picture this. An iPhone or iTunes users plugs into the AUX input of their car stereo. In many cases what happens next is that the alphabetically-first song in their library plays.
Every. Single. Time.
This has been enough to turn some people off their one-time favorites of the A Team and Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket A-Tasket".
For the paltry sum of only $0.99, these folk can have up to 10 minutes to set up a separate playlist — in silence.
Silence is golden... and Samir is raking in the gold.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by daver!west!fmc on Monday August 21 2017, @06:49PM (3 children)
A few years ago I put a Clarion CZ500 stereo in the car. (I'd broken the AM/FM button on the factory radio and thought a Bluetooth speakerphone might come in handy.)
So I start the car. The radio comes on, then Bluetooth gets going, then the CZ500 and the iPhone figure out that there's A2DP support on both ends and start playing from the phone, even if what you were lately using the CZ500 to listen to was the radio. No way to override this, you have to wait for it and then fiddle with the CZ500 to get back to the radio.
If the phone has been used to play music since its last reboot, it'll pick up where it left off. If not, you get the first track in the library, sorted by name. (I'm thinking some versions of iOS would shuffle-play from the whole library.)
The CZ500 has a USB port too, and knows how to work iPhones over it (but not older hard-disk iPods). I listen to rock, in a car (not really an audiophile environment), playing MP3s ('cause that's how I roll, even when ripping CDs in iTunes), and playing over Bluetooth, I heard distortion that was not a part of the program material and not heard when playing the MP3s in iTunes or from the phone with wired connection. So I learned to prefer the USB connection. And yes, it can get all the way through figuring out that there's an iThing on USB and start playing from it (same rules) and then switch over to Bluetooth (with a hiccup).
I'm not really sure what Samir Rezhami's track would do for all this.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 21 2017, @07:32PM
Eliminate the need for a car stereo. Duh. Coulda saved yourself all that trouble.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday August 21 2017, @08:29PM
I'd prefer a CZ550:
http://cz-usa.com/product-category/rifles/ [cz-usa.com]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:40AM
Unfortunately almost all OEM infotainment systems have similar issues. Toyota is the one exception: my last rental would search for Bluetooth automatically if it is the last played device, and NOT turn on the radio. But everyone else defaults to the radio if a media device is missing, and Bluetooth always will be missing on start. This is an inconvenience when I'm listening to a quiet podcast and need to increase the volume, then the next start have obnoxious advertisements blaring at me from terrestrial radio.