8 ms·
4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Let’s change that
- defcon84 13y agoi only get Indian music :p
- jessevanhouten 13y agoGetting mainly german schlagers here
- nyrina 13y agoMexican music here.
- hoektoe 13y agoService Unavailable music here
- retrogradeorbit 13y ago"Download Spotify" music here.
- honestcoyote 13y agoI love that stuff. The 404's playing their 808's, buzzing happily into oblivion.
- hrkristian 13y agoI actually hit gold first time around, Dorothy Shay - Blah Blah Blah
- struct 13y agoSeem to be getting lots of obscure 70s Chinese funk [1] [1] https://play.spotify.com/album/3JZwG20VxZxNr5mgjYMlw0 https://play.spotify.com/album/3JZwG20VxZxNr5mgjYMlw0
- arvidj 13y agoWould be nice to have a counter of the number of forgotten songs, updating in realtime.
- maaarghk 13y agoI absolutely agree!
- wyclif 13y ago503 Error.
- gizzlon 13y agoThis is great for hipsters who want to start listening to a band before they're popular :) Since the chances are kind of slim, you'd have to listen to a lot..
- jbrooksuk 13y agoThou shalt not stop liking a band just because they have become popular.[1] [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrMGXwhFLk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrMGXwhFLk
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoYeah, you just gotta tough it out; eventually, every band becomes unpopular again ;)
- test1235 13y agoThere probably a very good reason why people don't listen to those songs ;)
- zimpenfish 13y agoWell, I can vouch for Dimitris Arapakis being a bit hard going. Imagine a half speed version of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn mating with a Klezmer band and you'd be about right.
- Joeboy 13y ago> 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.
- twistedpair 13y agoWhat's a revelation about this? I recall taking out esoteric library books in college that had the vintage checkout cards in the back. Last checkout for the book was 20 years ago. There's a reason they have a music category called "Pop."
- colomon 13y agoI tried to do a book report on The Three Musketeers in high school, only to discover the local library had discarded its only copy because no one had checked it out in years. (This was a few years before Amazon and Project Gutenburg, with no bookstore in town. Nowadays I own two different translations in print and have another on my phone.)
- mmahemoff 13y agoDoes OP or anyone know how it's built? 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/ https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/lookup/ 2. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/search/ https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/search/
- henryaj 13y agoSorry, I don't. Your explanation sounds pretty plausible.
- wldlyinaccurate 13y agoI'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling. There is no point having your app publicly available if you're not prepared for small spikes like this. Edit: At the time of posting, the service was 503ing.
- mattmanser 13y agoLearning to be a developer is still a hodge-podge, unstructured process, scaling is definitely not taught and often talked about in extremely abstract terms because a lot of authors have no clue themselves what is and isn't scalable. 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.
- rhizome 13y agoThat's because scaling is not in the domain of developers, as much as Heroku/AWS/etc. strive to blur the lines. It's in system administration and architecture.
- mratzloff 13y agoIt's a collaborative process between all three. There are a thousand different ways developers can prevent (and conversely, enable) scalability.
- kahirsch 13y agoThere was a funny story[1] (transcript[2]) on the NPR program On The Media a couple of weeks ago about someone[3] who writes and records dozens of songs per day to put on Spotify (playlist[4]). Many songs deserve to not be played. [1] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/ [2] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/transcript/ [3] http://www.moternmedia.com/bio.html http://www.moternmedia.com/bio.html [4] http://spoti.fi/1gnQ7nd http://spoti.fi/1gnQ7nd
- gagege 13y agoI don't know, "Seaching for Sugarman" is a pretty good Rolling Stones approximation. Adam Sandler made a pretty legit music career out of stuff kind of like this.
- eyko 13y agoI thought poop into a wormhole wasn't too bad, the lyrics I mean.
- joe_the_user 13y agoSure, 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.
- jaynos 13y agoCouldn't see the original page due to the 503 error, but my immediate thought was that the guy from the OTM story was trying to get more song plays.
- chipsambos 13y agoThis is the antithesis to sites promoting quality content (hn, reddit, etc). It only encourages people to publish shit. Like this guy: http://www.gigwise.com/news/88051/spotify-joker-earns-%C2%A313000-uploading-slightly-rubbish-tracks-online http://www.gigwise.com/news/88051/spotify-joker-earns-%C2%A3... May as well try and rack up views for all the unseen ads on the internet.
- hrkristian 13y agoI'd argue this is not as you say, but rather another step towards decentralised marketing. 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.
- bgilroy26 13y agoThe "Knights of 'New'" on reddit have to wade through a lot of junk, but everyone else who uses the website benefits from their efforts. 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.
- MartinCron 13y agoYeah, when that guy was covered recently in the TLDR Podcast, there was no mention that he was basically spamming, and we shouldn't be glorifying people who are making a huge mess while scrounging around for change in the couch cushions of the internet.
- philipb 13y ago"Sorry, we're not available where you are. Leave your email to stay tuned for good news." Thanks Forgotify!
- kissickas 13y agoI really wanted to listen to the first random song, as well! What is the "I have Spotify" button for? It doesn't work for me... I was hoping that would let me log into my (US) account without being in the country, but nothing happens when I click it.
- zimpenfish 13y agoIt's not very (at the track level) - but at the same far too (at the 'release' level) - accurate. "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.
- hesselink 13y agoThis is very annoying on Spotify itself as well. If you use the 'radio' feature (basically random tracks based on some genre/artist), it often repeats the same track over and over, from different releases.
- ajtaylor 13y agoOh, so THAT'S why it repeats tracks! I always assumed that the radio feature just wasn't very smart.
- treskot 13y agoHTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.
- tehwalrus 13y agoI got a cool looking jazz trumpet piece, but it seems to want me to sign up for a Spotify account. I guess I should have known, I'm just too used to sound cloud.
- jsumrall 13y agoFun times listening to: Lesson 7: Education and Government part 5 by Morris Schreiber
- mediaserf 13y agoTheir cache engine will love you for this!
- FigBug 13y agoWhen DistroKid launched, I put a song on iTunes, Amazon and Spotiy. So far it has had no sales, but 3 streams, earning me 2 cents. I highly suggest everybody streams 'Goatsemon - Penis Bird' or buys it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Penis-Bird-Explicit/dp/B00FQS30W6 http://www.amazon.com/Penis-Bird-Explicit/dp/B00FQS30W6
- samweinberg 13y agoI'd rather download it off the Pirate Bay.
- FigBug 13y agoI just checked, it's not there. But it is on YouTube and my old Geocities page has been mirrored. You could find it if you wanted too, but it's not worth the effort.
- ctdonath 13y ago4M? Interesting. One of the recurring themes of "long tail" discussions is that everything is requested at least once every month or so. Would like more consideration of why that's not the case here.
- MrRage 13y agoI was in a band in my college years that played this "indie / experimental" instrumental rock. We only played maybe a dozen shows that were sparsely attended. There's one show we played that had at least 50-100 people, but that was because we opened for a semi-popular local band. In 2003-2004, just about when I left the band, we recorded an album in on of the band member's bedroom. I doubt more than a handful of people have ever listened to it. 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.
- techtalsky 13y agoAlright what is it. Now I want to hear it.
- MrRage 13y agoAlbum is _Hurt Seconds_ by The Shy Trafficker. I'll warn you that it's a long poorly recorded slog. There's a couple songs with some vocals but most of it is instrumental. Instrumental rock tends to be pretty unpopular I've found so I felt like the "warning" was needed.
- techtalsky 13y agoWell Explosions in the Sky do pretty well.
- urmane 13y agoMost songs don't deserve to be listened to. 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hmhrex 13y agoI am the exact same way. I absolutely love this idea. This site will see much use from me. I'm wondering why this isn't a Spotify app instead, though. They wouldn't have to handle the load, and you wouldn't have to navigate to a separate site.
- monksy 13y agoLast.fm has a lot of that.
- vitd 13y agoNot sure if it's up your alley, but if you like strange and terrible music from the 70s and 80s, check out Crap From The Past (http://crapfromthepast.com/ http://crapfromthepast.com/). Every show from its ~22 year history is available from archive.org (http://archive.org/search.php?query=%22crap%20from%20the%20past%22%20AND%20NOT%20bonus%20AND%20mediatype%3Aaudio%20AND%20collection%3Aopensource_audio&sort=-date&page=1 http://archive.org/search.php?query=%22crap%20from%20the%20p...). Enjoy!
- wiremine 13y agoSpotify has around 20 million songs [1], so around 20% of songs are never played. 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)? [1] http://press.spotify.com/us/information/ http://press.spotify.com/us/information/
- drharris 13y agoStorage is cheap with digital music. Even assuming 10 MB/song, you're looking at 40TB, less than $4k/mo on S3. It's not trivial, but it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to their other costs. Realistically the file sizes are much less than 10MB.
- barlescabbage 13y agoSurprisingly, just heard a song that I loved on it, http://open.spotify.com/track/6cZ1tXMm5BaYQzddgcY7W9 http://open.spotify.com/track/6cZ1tXMm5BaYQzddgcY7W9
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- brokenparser 13y agoIt would be nice to have this as a real Spotify app, they're written in HTML5 so it's pretty easy to do.
- archemike_ 13y agoI was going to listen then I saw how the extension was Coldfusion...