Forgotify Only Plays Spotify Songs That No One Has Ever Played Before
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
For example, here's the GET tracks/:id endpoint: 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.
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.
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."
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!
Might help weed out the worst of the worst, while still helping to discover something that is mostly unknown.
That, and 'Hey Arnold'.
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.
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!!
(I did actually try arranging _Fire_ for one voice and a mono accompaniment a while back, based on a piano score off the interwebs. I had enormous difficulty reverse engineering the chords from the piano score; the accompaniment is astonishingly minimalist, frequently just one note plus an octave-shifted melody line. You did a much better job than I did.)
Also, it gives me lot of videos that don't exist (account termination).
It seems to be a completely automated channel.
A year ago and still, 4 million songs unplayed? Color me skeptical that they are updating thier list.
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.
Perhaps they have, just not on Spotify.
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.)
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.
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...
> “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.”
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.
Debatable, surely. Especially since House of cards on NetFlix was a remake of a BBC drama from 1990 [1]. Suggesting that diversity exists because someone could be bothered to make it, presumably without data-mining. The point is that this diversity is, predictably, not in the mainstream.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series)
Then, a decade went by and the world caught up. All of a sudden, positive reviews started coming in and the album started selling. Today, every music critic that matters has the Velvet Underground and Nico on his/her list of best albums ever.
I can't claim that the marketing sucks - Andy Warhol was significantly better at self promotion than I am. The music most certainly does not suck. About the only thing that sucked was the timing!
Also worth pointing out that this was made by Spotify itself.