

Forgotify Only Plays Spotify Songs That No One Has Ever Played Before - onderkalaci
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/forgotify-only-plays-spotify-songs-that-no-one-has-ever-played-before/

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danso
I've tried Spotify's (pretty excellent) API...but nowhere in its docs can I
find any endpoint in which song plays is revealed. Am I missing something, or
has the API recently been updated? Getting play count would be great for data
analysis.

For example, here's the GET tracks/:id endpoint:
[https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/get-
track/](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/get-track/)

The closest thing to a play count is the "popularity" value, which is
described as thus:

> _The popularity of the track. The value will be between 0 and 100, with 100
> being the most popular.

The popularity of a track is a value between 0 and 100, with 100 being the
most popular. The popularity is calculated by algorithm and is based, in the
most part, on the total number of plays the track has had and how recent those
plays are.

Generally speaking, songs that are being played a lot now will have a higher
popularity than songs that were played a lot in the past. Duplicate tracks
(e.g. the same track from a single and an album) are rated independently.
Artist and album popularity is derived mathematically from track popularity.
Note that the popularity value may lag actual popularity by a few days: the
value is not updated in real time._

~~~
burkaman
I think you're right, popularity is really the only way to do this. And 0
popularity doesn't seem to mean 0 plays, I think a song with 5 plays 2 years
ago would probably have a 0 rating. This definitely seems like a project where
they came up with the idea first and then got as close as they could.

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quinndupont
The problem with these "never heard before" apps (there was one prior... I
can't recall the name) is that they effectively end up just playing musical
spam. If you look around at the bottom of the barrel you have all these
horrible companies that have either purchased rights to songs, or recorded
cover versions, all under the guise of being the real thing. It's basically
the Walmart DVD bin, or the "Just like CK One" perfume.

If there was something that played only legit, small label stuff by artists
who are trying to make great music (not a company trying to make a quick
buck), then that would be fantastic.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
_shameless plug time_ We're not an all-you-can-eat type of service, but with
BoomboxFM[1] we've been working on something like this. Every week we send you
3 songs from 3 different independent / undiscovered artists, personalized to
your genre preferences. Songs are free to download. That's it, nice and easy.

We're one week from demo day in our accelerator (TSF in N.C.) and actually use
the "4mm songs have never been played on Spotify" in the opening of our pitch.
What a lot of people are missing right now - amidst all the fighting about
crappy payouts from streaming services and still shady labels - is that even
if the payouts were amazing the lesser-known artists still need fans to know
about them in order to get plays. As David Foster Wallace said (paraphrasing),
"without gatekeepers/curators, we're all gonna be bodysurfing through shit 95%
of the time online."

[1] [http://www.boombox.fm/](http://www.boombox.fm/)

~~~
quinndupont
Looks awesome. I'm signing up now. (Unsolicited advice: the green "Click here
to join!" call to action has a kind of "spammy" feel to it... I can't quite
put my finger on it, but I feel like between the color and the font and the
generic wording I feel like I'm about about to sign up with a spam service.
The orange call to action below it is much better. My 2c.)

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
I can't argue with that! And appreciate the feedback. The site is actually
built on a template service (Strikingly), so we're a bit hindered right now.
Working on that, though.

LOTS of things we'd like to improve upon with the site and overall product,
but we're tackling things in our wheelhouse first (I'm a marketing/BD guy, non
tech). Enjoy the tunes!

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aczerepinski
This feature is already on Spotify. Just click on "jazz."

~~~
themartorana
Aw. I like Jazz :)

~~~
michael_h
Steve Grossman's "My Second Prime" blew my mind wide open on jazz.

That, and 'Hey Arnold'.

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hit8run
I feel the pain for many musicians that release tons of music and nobody ever
listens. I release music for fun from time to time and I only got traffic on
my I See Fire Drum & Bass Remix because I added (Hobbit End Credit Song) to
the title:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__d0M400nM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__d0M400nM)

But if you think you can just put something up on Youtube or Soundcloud and
get famous and rich you certainly should do a reality check.

I guess getting to known to a broader audience as an underdog is nowadays
again very very hard to achieve. There might have been a time when Labels
weren't on Youtube and Facebook (around 2009?) when it was easier.

~~~
hluska
Good track - you used a really classic break, the track is well recorded and
it all works out well. Heck, you didn't even overcompress the hats!!

It's very interesting how as electronic music has evolved, the way we describe
genres has evolved. In the mid-90s (when my friend Dean was a drum n bass DJ
and I played acid), the genre you make would have been called breaks. Breaks
were great because if you lived in a house city (like I did), you could mix in
some breaks and the pea soups would blend nicely...I don't know if you've ever
tried to play house music for two hours, but after about thirty minutes, I was
so bored that I wanted to leave the party. Anyways, I played techno, so that
is likely just the techno attitude...:)

Drum n bass was a little faster, the breaks would get cut up significantly
more, there were more dynamics in the drum mix, and the bass lines were so
thick that your kidneys would rattle.

Around the early 2000s, it seems like drum'n bass, jungle and breaks all
merged into one. I wish that I was still involved in electronic music - it
would be nice to still have a sense of how the music was evolving!!

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juliangregorian
Appropriate that it seems to be coded in ColdFusion, a mostly-forgotten
programming language.

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mistagiggles
Similar concept but for youtube:
[http://www.petittube.com/](http://www.petittube.com/)

~~~
rplnt
That name sounds like a barely legal porn site.

Also, it gives me lot of videos that don't exist (account termination).

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delgaudm
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149839)

A year ago and still, 4 million songs unplayed? Color me skeptical that they
are updating thier list.

~~~
rspeer
I don't think they are updating their list very much. I've certainly gotten
things on Forgotify that Spotify gives one bar of popularity instead of zero.

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ethanjones
This is a cool idea but it needs an small improvement: algorithms should sort
things out that can harm listeners badly. Al least as an option. ;-)

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ralphc
I feel kind of obligated to listen to each song to the end, like if I don't
I'm kicking a puppy or something.

~~~
ralphc
That is, until I got to "Readings from D.H. Lawrence: Selected and Read by
Harry T. Moore".

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bopf
I tried this for about 30 minutes without coming up with a single decent song.
But I guess that is the whole point of an app that plays songs no one else
listens to. I also cannot believe that there are so many unplayed songs on
Spotify. You would think that at least friends of the artist listen to these
songs. An app that shows songs that are just about to become popular (kind of
like newswhip.com for viral stories), would be something that would be much
more useful :). But maybe that exists already and I just don't know about it.

~~~
rspeer
I've found that [http://old.thesixtyone.com/](http://old.thesixtyone.com/) is
a good site for discovering new music. (You want the "old" interface because
it's so much more usable than the new one.)

Some of the bands that I learned about on thesixtyone became huge hits a year
or two or seven later -- fun. and Passenger come to mind. Of course many of
them were never heard from again, as well.

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bach_bach
This is cool. One of the songs I got was from a boy's choir going back to the
1500's, and Johann Bach was a Cantor of it. Very niche, but was gorgeous to
hear.

[https://open.spotify.com/track/31hmuwgwJK0ktw4celrRcp](https://open.spotify.com/track/31hmuwgwJK0ktw4celrRcp)

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pizu
Why nobody listens to these songs? Either crappy songs or failed marketing. Or
both.

~~~
angerman
This a good question. But this hits a very interesting point. Let us discard
crappy songs for a bit. And focus on marketing and other reasons. Marketing
plays an important role. Yet there are artists who cannot afford the marketing
or (and this is very sad in my opinion), the produced a piece that was ahead
of it's time or just didn't fit the current market trends.

These kind of services allow us to explore the full spectrum of creativity,
instead of homing in on current market trends. If we do not support the
outlier (or in this case leave them lying by the sidelines and ignore them),
we loose a part of cultural diversity. Not everyone has the same taste, but
how do you experience new things when you just follow the herd?

Coincidentally I was talking with someone about House of Cards over lunch. And
whether this is correct or not, it was claimed that House of Cards was the
results of machine learning and figuring out that the majority wanted Kevin
Spacey and a political drama. Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead
inevitably to less diversity. This would be a very sad development.

This is precisely why I think that services like this one are very important
to keep us culturally diverse. (at least in the limited spectrum of songs
available on spotify in this case.)

~~~
mseebach
> it was claimed that House of Cards was the results of machine learning and
> figuring out that the majority wanted Kevin Spacey and a political drama.
> Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less
> diversity.

If the algorithms are actually any good, they should lead to more, not less,
diversity. The algorithms would be able to detect that enough people want to
watch a Kung-Fu thriller set in medieval South India starring Summer Glau to
be viable - the point of these things is that "big data" machine learning can
process several orders of magnitude more data than a Hollywood-bubble studio
executive gut feeling ever could.

Formulaic mass-market blockbuster stuff is the product of humans and their gut
feelings, and broad averages over the mass market is the highest abstraction
they can handle. Algorithms have no such limitations.

The truly niche/innovative out-of-left-field stuff exists because it was able
to bypass concerns about mass-market viability - if anything, the algorithms
will pick up on niche trends much quicker, bringing it to a larger audience.

~~~
DanBC
> If the algorithms are actually any good, they should lead to more, not less,
> diversity. The algorithms would be able to detect that enough people want to
> watch a Kung-Fu thriller set in medieval South India starring Summer Glau to
> be viable

They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.

When a film in a series makes only half a billion it's seen as a failure and
people are called in to make the next one a success.

[http://uk.ign.com/articles/2015/05/19/simon-pegg-says-
origin...](http://uk.ign.com/articles/2015/05/19/simon-pegg-says-original-
star-trek-3-script-was-too-star-trek-y)

> “They had a script for Star Trek that wasn’t really working for them,”
> [Simon Pegg] told magazine Radio Times (via The Guardian). “I think the
> studio was worried that it might have been a little too Star Trek-y.

> “Avengers Assemble, which is a pretty nerdy, comic-book, supposedly niche
> thing, made $1.5bn. Star Trek: Into Darkness made half a billion, which is
> still brilliant. But it means that, according to the studio, there’s still
> $1bn worth of box office that don’t go and see Star Trek. And they want to
> know why.”

> He further explained “People don’t see it being a fun, brightly coloured,
> Saturday night entertainment like the Avengers,” adding that the solution
> was to “make a Western or a thriller or a heist movie, then populate that
> with Star Trek characters so it’s more inclusive to an audience that might
> be a little bit reticent.”

~~~
mseebach
> They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.

That may be what they _want_ , but that's not all they make. To wit, plenty of
shows and films (indeed, a large majority in number) aren't blockbusters, and
don't appear to have been intended as such.

Films that are _expected_ to make 1.5bn, but only make 0.5bn are failures in
that regard, sure - but that doesn't mean that there isn't a large market for
films that "only" make 0.5bn.

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sanqui
Tried playing a song on Forgotify, got "Sorry, we're not available where you
are."... I guess that's why I never tried Spotify.

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Drakim
Is this sustainable? Wouldn't they put themselves out of business pretty fast?

~~~
onderkalaci
Yeap, from the text "A crazier thought: Forgotify itself is, in a way,
ephemeral. If the rate at which people are using Forgotify exceeds the rate at
which Spotify adds new tracks, Forgotify is theoretically eating itself with
each new listen."

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iopq
Why doesn't it see that I'm already logged in to Spotify?

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ArekDymalski
Very nice concept,however I would be happy to filter by genre.

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breakingcups
[2014]

Also worth pointing out that this was made by Spotify itself.

