This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Matt Farley will record 200 songs this month. That's about 50 songs per week. He records whenever he's not at his day job; over the past seven years, he has written more than 16,000 numbers -- he's on keyboard, vocals and guitar -- available to buy and stream on iTunes and Spotify.
Are they any good? No, of course not. But there certainly are a lot of them. "I realised people will type weird stuff into search engines, and there's not always songs for the stuff," says Farley, 36. "If you search for 'love; on iTunes or Spotify, you're going to get something like 15 million songs. If you search 'monkey,' you're going to get fewer." So Farley decided to fill that gap.
The results are something between a giant online art installation and the first true example of search-engine-optimised music. Farley says the trick is to write songs about everything: from celebrities ("Ryan Gosling, You Are a Great Singer and Actor.
Will You Be My Friend?") to office supplies, about which Farley composed a 92-song album (he recommends the one about staplers). "I'm a big fan of follow-through, for the sheer joy of it," he says. His scheme has got his music out to an improbably large audience and earned him a modest living in a business increasingly inhospitable to independent musicians: he made more than $27,000 (£17,240) in 2014. Farley's goal? To quit his day job (he works at a group home for teenagers three days a week) and make music, any music, every day, not just in his down time.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
