‘The 30 Second Song Movie’ Was Removed From Amazon

Have you ever stopped to ponder the minuscule amount of royalties paid to artists by streaming services? Well, indie band The Pocket Gods certainly have, and they created a documentary called ‘The 30 Second Song Movie’ to shine a light on the issue. But, to their dismay, Amazon unceremoniously removed it from Prime Video without any explanation. 

The documentary chronicles The Pocket Gods’ journey against the music streaming services, particularly Spotify, who pays out a measly £0.002 per stream after buying The Joe Rogan Experience (the previous rate being £0.007 p/s). To challenge this, the band created 10 albums, each containing 100 songs that were only 30 seconds long. 

The band’s campaign for fairer royalties has even caught the attention of BBC News and Sky News, as well as Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek and the company’s Head of Music. But, despite passing Amazon’s content guidelines in January, the documentary was removed from Prime Video without warning or reason. It’s worth noting that Amazon also operates its own music streaming platform – Amazon Music. Coincidence? We’ll let you decide.

“We’ve spent the last year making our documentary on music streaming & 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.”.

To end their campaign, The Pocket Gods have released 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 a whopping £1m. The money raised from their efforts will fund their ethical streaming platform, which will pay out 1p per stream – 50 times Spotify’s current rate. 

“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.”