3 Lessons for Creators From the Guy Who Makes $200,000 “Spamming” Spotify

One person’s spam is another’s obsession

Matt Farley with one of his most profitable subjects. Credit: Motern Media

This weekend, the New York Times wrote a long profile about Matt Farley, a musician who will go down as one of the unsung gods of SEO.

Over the last decade, Farley has written and published over 24,000 songs. Each song has a keyword-optimized title that ensures it shows up in Spotify, Amazon Music, and TikTok searches.

The songs are often mundane and highly specific. Farley, for example, has sung over 1,000 versions of the Happy Birthday song, substituting different names in each one.

People discover the songs at random through music searches and then send them to friends or family to celebrate a birthday.

And each time they do that, Farley collects fractions of a cent. Likewise, he collects teensy bits of streaming revenue from songs about toilets, Ellen Degeneres, broccoli and much else.

In 2023, those fractions of pennies from SEO-optimized songs added up to $200,000 in earnings.

I’ve been friends with Matt for years, and I’ve written extensively about his strategy. You can read some of my articles about his series of poop songs, which are designed to capitalize on kids entering dirty words into…