Silent song climbs iTunes charts, solves annoying problem
Track prevents same song from starting every time phone gets plugged into a car
Since his new song dropped on iTunes earlier this month, a few folks on Twitter have said Samir Mezrahi is living in 3017.
The 35- year-old New York City resident’ s“Aa a a a Very Good Song ”— a silent track that runs for just under 10 minutes — is sitting in the 95th spot on American iTunes and is being praised for solving what some iPhone owners have found to be a wildly annoying glitch.
“Hey I released a blank song that will play 1st so that one song won’t play every time u plug your phone into ur car,” Mezrahi tweeted on Aug. 9 with a link to his track on iTunes, where it is on sale for $0.99. (It is also available on Google Play.)
Last year, Mezrahi wrote a Buzzfeed post about a frustrating problem: every time he plugged his iPhone into his car, it would automatically play the first track on the phone, in alphabetical order — in his case, “A-Punk” by American rock band Vampire Weekend, a song Mezrahi said was being ruined for him.
It’s a headache by no means particular to his car or his phone.
“So many people have grown to hate these songs they really like,” Mezrahi said this week in an interview with the Star. So he did something about it: a “kind of hack” for people who’d rather hear nothing than hear that one song, over and over.
He picked the title so it alphabet- ically tops any playlist. The song was initially supposed to be longer, but Mezrahi went with just under 10 minutes to avoid having to pay the full-album fee.
“I wanted it to be long to give people enough time to pick their song,” he said.
“If it was like 20 seconds it might not be that useful.”
Mezrahi said his understanding of the same-song default issue is that it’s not an Apple or a phone problem, but a USB/car issue — though he said he’s never reached out or attempted to address this beyond the blank track. He’s just happy that he found a fix and, apparently, so is the internet.
On Twitter, people have called the song “the best thing to ever happen to me,” and another claimed, “you’ve just blessed my life in the most won- derful and unexpected of ways.”
Apple did not respond to the Star’s questions before deadline. Mezrahi said he’s had no issues with selling a silent track in the store’s “pop” category — in fact, he isn’t the first person to release a sound-free track.
In 2014, American-band Vulfpeck attempted to fund their own tour by releasing a silent album on Spotify, attempting to cash in on streaming income while fans listened on repeat for hours while snoozing. According to media reports, the band earned just under $20,000.
That same year, Taylor Swift briefly topped Canadian iTunes charts with eight seconds of static, an accident called “Track 3,” which overeager fans mistook for a new song from her then-upcoming album 1989.
For now, Mezrahi’s track sits sandwiched between Old Dominion’s “Written in the Sand” and Jon Pardi’s “Dirt on My Boots” on American iTunes. The creator of “Aaaa a Very Good Song” is having fun with it; last week he tweeted to Justin Bieber, warning him that “Despacito” — a smash hit Bieber sings on — wasn’t safe at No. 1.
The current first song on Mezrahi’s phone alphabetically, by the way, is Swift’s “All You Had to Do Was Stay.”