Roger Fingas
A track consisting of nothing but 9 minutes and 58 seconds of silence is currently sitting at 49th place in Apple's iTunes charts, apparently out of frustration with the way many car audio systems work.
Called "A a a a a Very Good Song," the 99-cent track — released by Samir Mezrahi on Wednesday — copes with the fact that many audio systems will simply play tracks in alphabetical order whenever an iPhone connects via USB. With a regular music library this can be annoying, since the same song will play automatically until a person can select their own playlist.
The issue is unlikely to affect people who who depend solely on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.
The track's popularity may be a sign that many people are not only using USB in their vehicles but still relying on locally-stored music. iTunes sales have been on the decline for several years with the rise of streaming — but the Mac and Windows iTunes clients also let people import files from third-party sources, whether legal or otherwise.
Indeed the same effect as Mezrahi's song can be achieved for free by recording a silent track, properly naming and importing it, and then syncing with an iPhone.
The Mezrahi track is performing so well that it's beating out songs by well-established pop artists like Macklemore, Bruno Mars, and Selena Gomez.
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60 Comments
So at $.99 per purchase how much has this song raked in? How much goes to the "artist?" Brilliant move -- but I would have put something with "silent" or "silence" in the name. Now I suspect we can cue up the copycats...
I do not have any music locally stored on my iPhone yet it still acts as described in the article when I plug into USB car audio. It plays the 1st track from my super old library stored in iCloud. I remember the good old days when I use to care sooo much about that library...
I had to create something like this for myself 3 years ago when I got my 2014 Jeep Cherokee. The Uconnect system in that Jeep did exactly as this describes: automatically begins playing the first track in your library.
I actually created a 4 hr blank track. Not only because it is annoying to have the song start playing every time. When trying to use Siri or Maps, you would get no voice through the car speakers unless there was an audio track already playing. Solved that by having a long silent track always playing - unless of course playing other music.
This is really topical for me. My wife and I have been planning on an aftermarket Airplay headunit. She just rented a car for 4 days and returned home last night complaining about Carplay.
Her number 1 was that it autoplayed the first song on her list, she was infuriated which is unusual for her.
Number 2, she said it regularly wouldn't read a text, just 'dead air' when it should have been reading a text.
Finally, she said that the music shuts off when you try and do anything on your phone, which of course texting-while-driving-is-a-problem, but even if a passenger was playing music they couldn't do anything else b/c it would stop the music.
Of course, she had a map issue as well, Apple Maps didn't re-route her around construction it just kept sending her the wrong way...she had to use Waze/Google to get to her location and Waze showed the construction and routed correctly.
She says she doesn't want it in her car now.
I don't know, but it sounds awful,