Confessions of a Spotify Vandal
A folk-pop mischief-maker who goes by Catbreath has collected hundreds of thousands of streams by giving his songs prankish titles like “Chill Music,” “Gym Bangers,” and “My Discover Weekly.”
“You’re a pathetic little bitch,” opens a recent email sent to the songwriter and self-described “sonic graffiti” artist who calls himself Catbreath?. (Yes, the question mark is part of his official pseudonym.) His songs—or, more precisely, song titles—tend to piss people off, which is why he prefers to keep his real identity a mystery. The message, just one of many he keeps in a folder on his phone devoted to hate mail, reads in full:
You’re a pathetic little bitch for manipulating Spotify to play your shitty music when you try to play/shuffle liked songs etc with Google Home. Maybe try making music that’s actually good, and people will want to listen to it. What you’re doing is sad as fuck. Did I mention that your music is bad? Fucking loser.
Sincerely,
Seamus McFuckyourself
Mr. McFuckyourself, presumably, had just heard one of Catbreath’s biggest hits: “My Liked Songs,” which has clocked more than 375,000 plays on Spotify. Others have been duped by “Cozy Fall Playlist” or “True Crime Podcast,” his two most popular tunes on Apple Music. Still others encounter him via “Beatles Greatest Hits,” “Gym Bangers,” or “Short Sad Songs.” The vast Catbreath catalog is filled with song titles designed to trip up voice-command algorithms when their owners request to hear something else. As in, “Alexa, play… that last song again.” (“That Last Song Again” is featured on Catbreath’s 2023 album Tear Up?.)
I first encountered Catbreath’s music on a subreddit where Spotify power users go to complain about the platform’s various glitches and inconveniences, via a post titled “Why is this crap allowed?” The post had 1,700 upvotes and 70 comments, most of them addressing the artist in only slightly milder terms than Seamus McFuckyourself did, but with a few dissenting voices mixed in. “This is genius,” wrote LakeMichiganDude. “I like the music,” RealGonkDroid chimed in (four downvotes). “Some of it is charming,” added LuckyCla, “or at the very least decent.”
I half-expected Catbreath’s musical output to be a pile of A.I. slop, so I was delighted to find that it’s mostly made up of charmingly shambolic original songs and lo-fi sound collages, many of them about getting fucked up and feeling dissatisfied with society’s unfairness. My favorite Catbreath song, “Chill Acoustic Hits,” is marked by shaky guitar arpeggios and slacker-idealist lyrics: “I wish I was higher than I am right now/Wish I was better than I really can be/Wish this world ran differently/So everybody could have enough to eat.” If you told me it first appeared on a split cassette release with Sebadoh in 1990, I would believe you.
As I spent time rooting around Catbreath’s catalog, he started to seem less like a scammy opportunist and more like some sort of minor folk hero wielding a bong and a scuffed-up guitar. You could look at his gimmicky song titles as a bit of canny self-promotion—or as an effort to disrupt, in some small but real way, the seamless surfaces of a streaming system that exploits musicians and encourages listeners to think of their labor as worthless. In truth, it’s a bit of both.
When I saw that his Spotify profile includes an email address—that’s where he receives the hate mail—I couldn’t resist getting in touch and asking for an interview. He was happy to oblige… as long as I didn’t reveal his name or location.
Tell me about the history of Catbreath and when you first hit on your distinctive way of titling songs and albums. On your first couple of releases, the titles are a little more normal.
Catbreath: I’ve been playing in a punk rock band with my friends for more than 10 years, and I got to a point in my 20s where I had a shitload of songs on the back burner. I just started recording a bunch of them through GarageBand, because I didn’t want to forget them. And that became the first two Catbreath albums.
On the second record, there’s this song called “Car Jams.” It’s pretty stupid, I’m not gonna lie. I took the 7-inch record of “Cars” by Gary Numan and slowed down the drum beat and did a little guitar ditty over it. No one was listening to my stuff on Apple Music at the time. Every song had one or two plays. Then I noticed that that song had five hundred plays. So I typed in “Car Jams” on Apple Music, and that song came up before any algorithm-driven driving playlist or anything like that. At that point, I was like, Shit, I need to drop an album of songs with titles that someone might hypothetically try to look up.
I like that you’re doing what you want to do as a songwriter, and giving the songs these titles as a way of getting them in front of people, rather than being like, I’m just gonna use A.I.-generated music and make money off of this glitch.
Streaming sucks, but it is cool that people listen to it all over the world. Through Spotify, you can get a pretty good grasp of where people are and how many times they’re listening. To be able to see that there’s this guy in Poland who just listened to my entire discography yesterday is cool. It makes it feel like there’s some sort of connection there.
There are some people that do the A.I.-generated beats with these kinds of titles, which I had no idea about until I released “Relaxing Music” as a single, and it got zero plays. I realized that there was already an artist called Relaxing Music. After that, I figured out that—in case anyone else is trying to do this—as long as it’s a title that no one else has used yet, it’s pretty much fair game.
Was there a particular song that popped off in a way that made you realize the potential effectiveness of this strategy?
Once I released “My Liked Songs,” that really started everything spiraling in an upward motion. That’s the one that I get hate mail for—people have gotten pretty graphic about what I should do with my life.
Do your friends know about what you’re doing?
I’ve kind of kept it to myself, but I told some people around town about the project. As opposed to being like, Oh, I should do that too, a lot of musicians get kind of salty about it. One of my buddies had a good point: He was like, “Who wants to write a song about their dead dad and call it ‘Chill Hits’?” People get really serious about their art. But here’s a way to cheat the system that we’ve all been fucking dealing with our entire lives.
If someone else started adopting your titling strategy themselves, would you feel territorial about it?
Absolutely not. If anything, I try to implore people to do this. Streaming is messed up. Ninety percent of the streaming money goes to the top one percent of artists. With these songs, I’m probably inadvertently getting some amount of streams that would have otherwise gone to the mega artists, the Weeknd and Taylor Swift and all that jazz. So if people can do that, why not take from the top?
Do you see what you’re doing as a sort of protest? Are you deliberately fucking with people’s experiences of these platforms that take advantage of musicians?
Totally. Though I didn’t necessarily know my songs would go to the extremes that they did. I have a song called “American Christian Rock” that’s just 30 seconds of this record playing in reverse on my stereo. Because if anyone was going to try to listen to American Christian rock, it’s just like, Eff you, here’s some noise. I like to mess with the Christians because I was raised in a heavily Catholic house, so there’s some animosity there. I made a pro-choice song that was called “Christian Music.” I made “Country Songs About Jesus,” and it’s just noise for two minutes. Not even the pleasant white noise. It’s just, like, a racket.
Are there musicians that you think about as influences on the anarchic style of this project?
Not to be like, I’m breaking some ground here, but I don’t know of too many people doing this. But I’ve always found what Jeff Rosenstock did with [the punk collective] Bomb the Music Industry! very inspirational: They were like, “If you learn one of our songs, you can come onstage and play with us.” That concept has always blown my mind. As far as the musical direction, it’s kind of a mesh between Beck and Pat the Bunny—a lot of folk-punk stuff about anarchism and doing drugs. The perfect combo.
How much money are you making from this?
Around $150 a month. It’s a little chunk of change. I’m definitely not paying bills with it. But it’s more than I make from anything else I’ve put on the internet. Playing in a band, usually, means hemorrhaging money. So it’s nice to be able to put stuff out and watch this little bank account slowly grow.
