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

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

#12

Post by danso »

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/

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.

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

#15

Post by mseebach »

angerman wrote: post #6
pizu wrote: post #3

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

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…

> 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.

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

#17

Post by DanBC »

mseebach wrote: post #15
angerman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 medie…

> 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-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.”

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