On March 31, 2024, The New York Times published an in-depth report on Matt Farley. As a musician, Farley has not only made significant achievements in the music industry but has also quietly excelled in the field of SEO.
Over the past decade, Farley has composed and released more than 24,000 songs. Each song title is meticulously optimized with keywords to ensure they stand out in search results on platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, and TikTok. While the content of these songs is simple, they are highly targeted.
For example, Farley has created over 1,000 versions of the “Happy Birthday” song, each using a different name. People unintentionally discover these songs through music searches and then send them to friends or family to celebrate birthdays. Each time this happens, Farley earns a small amount of income. By 2023, Farley’s annual revenue from these SEO-optimized songs had accumulated to $200,000.
The Rise of Matt Farley’s Music Empire
Growth Methods
- Keyword Optimization: Use popular keywords in song titles to increase search volume.
- High Output: Created over 21,000 songs covering various topics.
- Trend Adaptation: Created humorous songs about bodily functions.
- Multi-platform Distribution: Uploaded songs to Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and more.
- Fan Engagement: Increased engagement based on fan suggestions.
- Social Media Promotion: Gained attention through viral sharing on TikTok and other platforms.
Growth Results
- Revenue Increase: Earned over $65,000 annually, with TikTok traffic contributing an additional $2,400 yearly.
- Listener Growth: Spotify plays for “Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee” increased from 8,000 to 16,000.
- Broad Coverage: Farley’s music gained significant exposure across multiple platforms.
Part One: Beyond Google’s SEO Strategy
In September 2023, Google’s “Helpful Content Update” led to a massive overhaul of millions of blogs, causing many websites to experience a drastic drop in traffic by 50% to 80%. This March, Google introduced an even stricter core update. These changes have caused significant concern in the SEO community, leading many professionals to seek new platforms or ways to recover from Google’s impact.
However, Matt Farley’s success story highlights the importance of going beyond traditional platforms. Farley applied classic long-tail keyword strategies to Spotify and other streaming services. By applying traditional SEO strategies to this multibillion-dollar platform, Farley carved out a lucrative niche for himself.
If your website or content business has been impacted by Google’s updates and you’re seeking to diversify your traffic sources, Farley’s approach offers valuable insights. You should strategically position yourself on popular platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook. For example, if you have a travel website, besides sharing content on platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, should you consider promoting on unconventional platforms like Nextdoor?
Part Two: Quantity – Your Top Priority
People have placed increasing emphasis on the importance of content quality. In affiliate marketing, many spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning button colors, page titles, and sentence structures in an attempt to gain more traffic out of a page. However, after years of meticulous adjustments, their websites might only have 50 pages. While this approach was effective in the past, it is gradually losing its edge.
In a world now flooded with AI-generated content and powerful brands, the strategy of investing significant time and effort into each page is unlikely to yield a substantial return on investment for small businesses or individuals. Matt Farley’s strategy offers an alternative perspective. He created over 24,000 songs covering virtually every topic, from garage door openers to various fruits, allowing Farley to capitalize on nearly any search term.
Many of these songs are very similar, if not almost identical. For example, with his birthday songs, he simply sings the classic “Happy Birthday” tune and substitutes different names in each recording. From a musical standpoint, these works are not groundbreaking, but that doesn’t matter. This templated, systematic approach enabled Farley to scale his content production massively and secure a place in the search results on platforms like Spotify and Amazon Music.
What can we learn from this? Quantity often proves to be even more important. It’s worth noting that Farley’s work consistently meets a certain quality standard. He didn’t just record one song and then use AI to generate different names, churning out low-quality content. Meanwhile, he didn’t spend days on the musical and creative details of each piece. He quickly wrote and recorded the songs and published to streaming platforms with minimal revision.
In an era where content returns are diminishing, quantity is becoming increasingly vital for creators. If your blog has 100 perfect pages or 10 meticulously edited YouTube videos, but Google now delivers only 10% of the traffic it used to, it’s difficult to maintain a competitive edge, regardless of the quality of your work. But if you have 24,000 pieces of content that meet basic quality standards, even if today’s platforms offer only limited traffic to independent creators, that content can still generate significant revenue. As Farley demonstrates, no matter how mundane your ideas may seem, putting them into action can create value.
Part Three: Spammy but Cherished
Matt Farley’s story revolves around the ambiguous and highly subjective definitions of terms like “spam” and “low-quality content.” With algorithm updates, Google has labeled millions of websites as junk content.
However, the definition of junk content is often in the eye of the beholder. While some might disdain Farley’s “shotgun” approach to music creation, he has simultaneously attracted a devoted following. Hundreds of fans attend his live performances each year, and his book once became a bestseller on Amazon. In an interview with The New York Times, Farley mentioned that his fans could fill a 5,000-seat auditorium. Some have even spent hundreds of hours listening to the 24,000 songs he has created.
This illustrates the idea that one person’s spammy can be another person’s treasure. Farley is unapologetic about this, finding it baffling that people accuse him of “cheating” or engaging in “hack” behavior. Farley has spent thousands of hours creating these songs. If what he’s doing is a “scam” or a get-rich-quick scheme, it would be one of the worst, as his success comes from decades of dedicating 10 to 12 hours a day in his basement to making music. Many content creators invest significant time and effort into their work. Even those who build large AI content websites spend a lot of time developing and optimizing processes, assembling teams, running experiments, and more.
If the content you create serves your audience, no matter how niche or unique that audience may be, then you are doing something valuable. It should be noted that you ignore algorithms or external criticisms, focus on creating what your real audience wants, and take pride in your creative work.
Part Four: Final Thoughts
Matt Farley’s approach has always been an inspiration to me. It reminds people that if you can set aside all preconceived notions and fully immerse yourself in creating what you believe to be important, you can achieve remarkable success.
Nowadays, many people feel disheartened by content creation. But Farley’s example proves that regardless of how unstable the environment may be, creation remains valuable and can yield significant rewards. In this sense, you should keep in mind remaining true to your original aspiration, sticking to doing things that you are devoted to, and unleashing creativity can lead you to achieve your success.
