13 ms·

Forgotify Only Plays Spotify Songs That No One Has Ever Played Before

106 points by onderkalaci 11y ago

ethanjones 11y ago
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. ;-)
mistagiggles 11y ago
Similar concept but for youtube: http://www.petittube.com/ http://www.petittube.com/
- Retr0spectrum 11y ago
  I found this: https://www.youtube.com/user/OnychaHazel/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/OnychaHazel/videos It seems to be a completely automated channel.
- rplnt 11y ago
  That name sounds like a barely legal porn site. Also, it gives me lot of videos that don't exist (account termination).
pizu 11y ago
Why nobody listens to these songs? Either crappy songs or failed marketing. Or both.
- angerman 11y ago
  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.)
  - stkni 11y ago
    >> Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less diversity. This would be a very sad development. 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) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series)
    - jcurbo 11y ago
      Which was originally based on a book!
  - mseebach 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      > 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-original-star-trek-3-script-was-too-star-trek-y 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.”
- rprimrose 11y ago
  A lot of it just seems to be outside what I'd imagine Spotify's core demographic listens to. I'm getting a lot of Country and Classical music and also lots of non-English tracks.
- hluska 11y ago
  Sometimes the songs are crappy or the marketing sucks, but other times, the music is just a little too far ahead of its time. The Velvet Underground and Nico is the classic example of this - by all accounts (critical and commercial) it was a complete flop when it was released. The subject matter was so controversial that many radio stations banned it. And, it was barely reviewed 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!
Drakim 11y ago
Is this sustainable? Wouldn't they put themselves out of business pretty fast?
- onderkalaci 11y ago
  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."
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ArekDymalski 11y ago
Very nice concept,however I would be happy to filter by genre.
danso 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
delgaudm 11y ago
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.
- Bladegunner 11y ago
  well, spotify probably added a bunch of songs as well.
- rspeer 11y ago
  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.
aczerepinski 11y ago
This feature is already on Spotify. Just click on "jazz."
- themartorana 11y ago
  Aw. I like Jazz :)
  - michael_h 11y ago
    Steve Grossman's "My Second Prime" blew my mind wide open on jazz. That, and 'Hey Arnold'.
- smtddr 11y ago
  Ouch, Jazz is my favorite genre. You can often catch me with a browser-tab opened to smoothjazz.com's streaming radio.
sanqui 11y ago
Tried playing a song on Forgotify, got "Sorry, we're not available where you are."... I guess that's why I never tried Spotify.
hit8run 11y ago
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.
- david-given 11y ago
  Bet you just got a tonne of hits. (It's pretty cool.) (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.)
- hluska 11y ago
  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!!
quinndupont 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.)
    - petejodo 11y ago
      I agree. I think it's also because the button is a non-flat design on a rather flat designed page and sticks out
iopq 11y ago
Why doesn't it see that I'm already logged in to Spotify?
bopf 11y ago
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.
- rlpb 11y ago
  > You would think that at least friends of the artist listen to these songs Perhaps they have, just not on Spotify.
- rspeer 11y ago
  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.
ralphc 11y ago
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 11y ago
  That is, until I got to "Readings from D.H. Lawrence: Selected and Read by Harry T. Moore".
juliangregorian 11y ago
Appropriate that it seems to be coded in ColdFusion, a mostly-forgotten programming language.
bach_bach 11y ago
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
breakingcups 11y ago
[2014] Also worth pointing out that this was made by Spotify itself.

106 points by onderkalaci 11y ago

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. ;-)

mistagiggles 11y ago

Similar concept but for youtube: http://www.petittube.com/ http://www.petittube.com/

Retr0spectrum 11y ago
I found this: https://www.youtube.com/user/OnychaHazel/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/OnychaHazel/videos It seems to be a completely automated channel.
rplnt 11y ago
That name sounds like a barely legal porn site. Also, it gives me lot of videos that don't exist (account termination).

pizu 11y ago

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

angerman 11y ago
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.)
- stkni 11y ago
  >> Now if this is the future of tv, this will lead inevitably to less diversity. This would be a very sad development. 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) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series)
  - jcurbo 11y ago
    Which was originally based on a book!
- mseebach 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    > 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-original-star-trek-3-script-was-too-star-trek-y 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.”
rprimrose 11y ago
A lot of it just seems to be outside what I'd imagine Spotify's core demographic listens to. I'm getting a lot of Country and Classical music and also lots of non-English tracks.
hluska 11y ago
Sometimes the songs are crappy or the marketing sucks, but other times, the music is just a little too far ahead of its time. The Velvet Underground and Nico is the classic example of this - by all accounts (critical and commercial) it was a complete flop when it was released. The subject matter was so controversial that many radio stations banned it. And, it was barely reviewed 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!

Drakim 11y ago

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

onderkalaci 11y ago
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."
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

ArekDymalski 11y ago

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

danso 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

delgaudm 11y ago

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.

Bladegunner 11y ago
well, spotify probably added a bunch of songs as well.
rspeer 11y ago
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.

aczerepinski 11y ago

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

themartorana 11y ago
Aw. I like Jazz :)
- michael_h 11y ago
  Steve Grossman's "My Second Prime" blew my mind wide open on jazz. That, and 'Hey Arnold'.
smtddr 11y ago
Ouch, Jazz is my favorite genre. You can often catch me with a browser-tab opened to smoothjazz.com's streaming radio.

sanqui 11y ago

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

hit8run 11y ago

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.

david-given 11y ago
Bet you just got a tonne of hits. (It's pretty cool.) (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.)
hluska 11y ago
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!!

quinndupont 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.)
  - petejodo 11y ago
    I agree. I think it's also because the button is a non-flat design on a rather flat designed page and sticks out

iopq 11y ago

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

bopf 11y ago

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.

rlpb 11y ago
> You would think that at least friends of the artist listen to these songs Perhaps they have, just not on Spotify.
rspeer 11y ago
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.

ralphc 11y ago

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 11y ago
That is, until I got to "Readings from D.H. Lawrence: Selected and Read by Harry T. Moore".

juliangregorian 11y ago

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

bach_bach 11y ago

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

breakingcups 11y ago

[2014] Also worth pointing out that this was made by Spotify itself.