A home for the unloved tunes of Spotify
Awhile back, Lane Jordan heard an interesting fact: Spotify, the streaming music service, said that 20% of the songs in their catalog had never once been played.
That got Jordan, an interactive art director, feeling inspired — and so, along with developers J Hausmann and Nate Gagnon, they developed a way to get those songs heard. Yesterday, they gave their solution an official launch: it’s called Forgotify and it provides listeners with a random selection of these “neglected songs.”
The website uses an embedded Spotify player and runs a program searching Spotify for songs with a “0” popularity rating, indicating that the song has never been selected by a user, Jordan explains. Every day, the program is run again, removing any song that has been played even once.
Which means, he says, that Forgotify’s “4 million songs” figure for its catalog isn’t quite exact — but not because Forgotify users are making a dent in the catalog. Instead, the number is growing (“But barely,” he clarifies) as Spotify adds new music. The most recently added un-listened-to music isn’t even on Forgotify’s list.
And, as of today, neither is “Lethem Ladies Strathspey” by the Caledonian Fiddle Orchestra, randomly provided by Forgotify as the soundtrack to the writing of this post. One down — only millions to go.
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