When you apply for a job you gotta get noticed. Otherwise you’re just part of the stack and get lost like Kate and Sawyer.
We’ve all heard about people trying to stand out with their resumés. Creating videos, infographics, viral Craigslist postings, chocolate bars, you name it.
But here’s a new take: the Spotify resumé and portfolio.
Stockholm-based art director Christian Söderholm came up with the idea and thought it might be fun to work on and try to pull off. Christian has been working in advertising for a while now he wasn’t actually looking for a job.
It was easy to contact him. The last song on “Biography” is called “Contact him at christiansoderholm@gmail.com.” So I sent him an email.
Here’s what he said about the process in case you want to give it a shot:
Uploading an album on Spotify
The first step is going through a Spotify-approved music distributor. These are the services that handle the licensing and distribution and administer royalty payments. You never work with directly with Spotify.
It was a little tricky to find a distributor. The first “artist aggregator” did not accept the albums because they (correctly) identified them as advertising. So he tried another and was accepted.
Making the albums
The distributors review each album individually and you have to pay for each album or song you publish as well. As an estimate, TuneCore charges $30 to upload an album for the first year and $50 each following year.
Christian’s personal portfolio, “Biography,” is only 1 minute and 28 seconds long and surprisingly catchy. I’ve had it on repeat most of the day.
The tracks consist of a pleasant lady’s voice talking over a soft guitar. Christian actually wrote and performed the background melody so technically this could be classified as music rather than spoken word.
I’m not exactly sure where the woman came from or how he did the mixing but in case you’re interested, here’s Emily who will record a voiceover in a British accent for $5 on Fiverr.
What’s next?
So far the reaction has been great considering it started out as an experiment. He’s gotten a little PR and, as a bonus, he’s actually getting paid every time someone listens to his portfolio. Considering that Spotify typically pays $0.006 / stream, he’s not quitting his day job any time soon.
The next step for Christian is to get to 250 Spotify followers so he can become a “verified artist” and get access to extra features like merchandise and tour dates.
Check out his Spotify profile and give him a follow if you dig his style.
Bonus
Apart from his personal biography, he also has albums for four of his projects:
- Emoji Turns Real – using emojis to send donations through SMS
- Kate’s Advent Calendar – creating a 24-door advent calendar for an organic market on Instagram
- Life Without Trees – an ad campaign to raise awareness of the deforestation of eastern Africa
- The WiFi-Ad – selling a pocket WiFi using WiFi (this is actually an awesome idea)
