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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

#21

Post by hit8run »

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

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.

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

#22

Post by quinndupont »

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.

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

#25

Post by mseebach »

DanBC wrote: post #17
mseebach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They don't want "viable", they want blockbuster.

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.

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

#26

Post by burkaman »

danso wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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

#27

Post by bopf »

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.

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

#28

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

quinndupont wrote: post #22

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"…

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/

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

#29

Post by rlpb »

bopf wrote: post #27

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)…

> You would think that at least friends of the artist listen to these songs

Perhaps they have, just not on Spotify.

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

#30

Post by quinndupont »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #28
quinndupont wrote: post #22

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"…

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 p…

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.)
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