7 Actual Recorded Songs That Consist of Nothing at All
If you want to release a song, you need inspiration, skill, passion, talent, drugs and some basic recording equipment. Or, maybe you need none of that because you release a track that contains no sound but is just pure silence.
That second option sounds flat-out insane, but it’s happened a lot more than you’d think.
The Silent Song, and the Copycat
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The most famous time someone wrote a song that consisted of just silence was in 1952. The composer was John Cage, and he called the piece “4’33”” because it lasts four minutes and 33 seconds. Any instrument could play it, stated Cage generously, but here it is on a piano:
Some people became very angry on hearing this song (or rather on not hearing it) because the composer and performer were clearly trolling us all. That would make Cage the hero in this story. But half a century later, in 1952, a British composer named Mike Batt included a track named “One Minute of Silence” on an album for his band the Planets. The Cage estate sued.
You probably shouldn’t be able to copyright the concept of silence. In fact, Cage hadn’t even been the first person to write a silent song. There had been the 19th-century French composition “Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man,” which came one year after a separate silent piece called “Il Silenzio: pezzo caratteristico e descrittivo (stile moderno).” Or, if we’re looking at Cage’s contemporaries, Yves Klein, whom you might know from a painting that’s just one unique shade of blue, did a song with 20 minutes of silence.
Batt called the suit absurd. He also joked that his composition was superior to Cage’s — “I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds” — and perhaps this sealed his doom. In the end, he agreed to settle for a six-figure sum. He claimed this was a victory, because the Cage estate accepted the offer, but we’re not so sure about that.
A a a a a Very Good Song
If your personal digital library sorts alphabetically, it’ll default to the same song every time, even if you set it to shuffle afterward. For example, if you sort by artist, perhaps your player will start by playing “I Think I’m a Clone Now” by “Weird Al” Yankovic, year after year, thanks to the opening quotation mark at the start of his name. If you sort by title, perhaps the first song will be a 2017 release titled “A a a a a Very Good Song.”
This song is 10 minutes long and contains no sound. Unlike the silent songs we listed above, this wasn’t an artistic statement. Samir Mezrahi offered it for a very practical purpose. When people entered their cars, they were annoyed by iTunes starting automatically and immediately blasting music, particularly if it was always the same song. Add “A a a a a Very Good Song” to your playlist, and the software would always start with silence instead, giving you plenty of time to switch to whatever you’d prefer once you had a moment.
The song sold decently well, to people willing to pay 99 cents for peace. These people could, of course, have created some similarly silent file themselves for free and named it so it came first alphabetically, but they wanted to reward Mezrahi’s ingenuity.
Bite Me
We mentioned Weird Al just now, so we definitely need to mention his 1992 song “Bite Me.”
Arguably, this song contains no silence, as it consists of eight seconds of loud screaming. However, this appeared as a hidden track at the end of his album Off the Deep End. If you play the album, you’ll hear the last listed track, “You Don’t Love Me Anymore,” followed by 10 minutes of silence. Then in comes “Bite Me.”
This was a fine way of scaring anyone who left the album on, accomplishing the exact opposite of what Mezrahi would later set out to do. It also referenced a hidden track at the end of Nirvana’s Nevermind (the cover of Off the Deep End parodies the famous baby cover of Nevermind). That track, “Endless, Nameless,” also consists mostly of screaming.
Madonna’s ‘American Life’
You similarly ran into a long stretch of silence followed by one loud interruption if you got yourself a copy of Madonna’s 2003 album American Life. You wouldn’t run into that if you bought a copy of the album, but if you pirated it, you might have found yourself with a bunch of blank tracks, ending with a recording of Madonna saying, “What the fuck do you think you are doing?”
This didn’t fully succeed at ending piracy. Actual MP3s of the album’s songs spread alongside the fake ones, and in retaliation, pirates hacked Madonna’s website so that it offered downloads of the real MP3s for free.
The Ten Coolest Things About New Jersey
The Bloodhound Gang included this track on the same album as their one famous song, “The Bad Touch.” It talks about several famous aspects of New Jersey. It mentions Princeton, and it mentions the Sterling Hill Mine, full of fluorescent rocks. It mentions The Trentonian newspaper, who once reported on the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital burning down using this headline: “Roasted Nuts.” It talks of how every Major League baseball is coated in mud from one New Jersey riverbank, and it naturally name-drops the Jersey Devil, a cryptid invented by none other than Ben Franklin.
Just kidding. It doesn’t mention any of that. The song is 10 seconds of silence.
The Spotify Hack
Several concepts we’ve mentioned above, including pirating music and paying 99 cents for an MP3, will be alien to younger listeners, who stream all their music legally without paying anything for each song. The artist still makes money off these streams — a tiny sliver of money each stream, which might add up to something if people listen to the songs many millions of times.
In theory, you could support your favorite artist by streaming their songs on repeat, endlessly. Some devoted fans really do this, at least when an album first comes out, to ensure it goes to number one. But you probably don’t want to listen to their songs 24/7, and muting Spotify while it plays them feels too complicated.
The band Vulfpeck came up with a solution for this in 2014. Their album Sleepify has 10 songs. The first is named “Z,” the second is “Zz,” the third is “Zzz” and so on. Each lasts just over 30 seconds, as this was the minimum length for Spotify to consider a track legitimate. Each contains nothing but silence. Play this album in the background, urged Vulfpeck, and make the band money without even noticing what you’re doing.
Spotify cut them off when they realized what was happening. Still, the band netted $18,000 in royalties before they got caught.
Taylor Swift’s ‘Track 3’
When we mentioned fans who’ll stream an artist to push them to number one, we were thinking of a few fandoms in particular. Talyor Swift fans (or “Huguenots,” as they prefer to be called) can be counted on to play every song on repeat when it comes out, whether they like it or not, purely out of loyalty.
As proof, consider what happened when 1989 came out in 2014. The label released a song titled “Track 3” as part of the album. The album’s actual third track was “Style,” which would go on to be huge, but this “Track 3” was an accidental release. It was eight seconds long and contained nothing but white noise.
“Track 3” went to number one in Canada.
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