4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Let’s change that
forgotify.com
forgotify.com
[1] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/
[2] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/transcript/
But why listen to a "Rolling Stones approximation" when you can listen to the Stones.
As far as I can tell, a large of portion of bands aiming to make it are indeed good or bad approximations of existing pop bands and mover over, entirely aimed at satisfied the fairly uniform taste of mainstream audiences.
Most are poor approximations of this but a few are indeed good approximations of this. But it doesn't matter.
The problem is that none of these develop anything creative or more specifically, they aren't serving any taste pool but this wide mainstream (this is arguably necessary for their success - they are practicing at being good at specific skill, being alternative wouldn't be the same practice).
So even, especially with even, bands being "almost good", there's still no reason for me to listen.
For a good example, search for Thrift Shop -- you might be inclined to play "Thrift Shop" by "Thrift Shop" on his hit album "Thrift Shop." It has 675k plays already.
In the old days one had no choice - whatever was on the radio was what you heard, and it was very difficult to hear the whole CD/tape/ancient-media. I used to have a 3-4 song rule - if I didn't like 3-4 songs on the album I wouldn't buy it. It was very hard to adhere to, and breaking the rule almost always resulted in disappointment.
MP3 changed that, but not because of pirating - because listeners could start sampling the whole product to see if they wanted to buy it. Tech improvements keep making that easier. Bands will have to work harder to produce quality work for their fans (including having a good handle on what 'quality' and 'fans' means for them), instead of producing one good song and ten fillers and calling it an album.
"Wayward Wind" by Gogi Grant (off "Sweet Memories") is listed -but- the track itself is listed as one of the most popular if you search for her, just not off that particular album. There's a metric ass-ton of releases which probably explains why one particular release has zero even when the track is clearly very popular.
F-. MUST TRY HARDER.
I see there's a track popularity figure in the API [1] so maybe these songs have zero popularity. And then I can only assume they've crawled every track as the search API [2] doesn't support filtering by popularity.
1. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/lookup/
2. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/search/
May as well try and rack up views for all the unseen ads on the internet.
Because Spotify has its own ranking system and social media/last.fm scrobbling, while a bad song will merely be skipped over, a good undiscovered song with get saved to playlist and exposed via networks to a much greater extent than it had a chance of being before.
This is a similar deal for Spotify. Some percentage of these songs are good, it might be less than one percent, but if you can get 500 people with decent ears to listen to 1 song each, you can move the needle.
Edit: At the time of posting, the service was 503ing.
A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.
Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.
Why, would anything bad happen to the developer if his toy app breaks down under the pressure?
I wonder if there's a marked for (helping to) optimizing sites and web-apps..
As someone else pointed out, learning to program is often done on your own, so where would someone go to learn this on their own outside of the hot seat?
Since the chances are kind of slim, you'd have to listen to a lot..
Imagine a half speed version of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn mating with a Klezmer band and you'd be about right.
Thanks, I will definitely be checking this out later.
I highly suggest everybody streams 'Goatsemon - Penis Bird' or buys it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Penis-Bird-Explicit/dp/B00FQS30W6
Two random questions:
- How much is Spotify paying to host those unplayed songs?
- How many of songs have a small number of plays? (< 5 plays, for example)?
This album is on Spotify. If it has any listens it's probably because I listened to it, or maybe another one of the former band members did.
Lesson 7: Education and Government part 5 by Morris Schreiber
Thanks Forgotify!
The 404's playing their 808's, buzzing happily into oblivion.