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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Not necessarily small labels but the subreddit "listentothis" has been my source of interesting music for a while now. Its aim is new / overlooked artists. There is a "radio" like station as well which plays each submission in turn.
Maybe a better approach would be, instead of the songs that nobody has listened to at all, show us the songs that have been played 1-10 times, or 1-20, or 10-20, or...
Might help weed out the worst of the worst, while still helping to discover something that is mostly unknown.
I just tried it. The first song was obscure normandic trumpet music, the second was indian pop, and the third was an opera. Didn't come across any musical spam, unless the indian song was a cover.
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:
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.
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!!
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.)
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.
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.
I've found that 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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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."
[+] [-] danso|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] burkaman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quinndupont|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] IanCal|10 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis
http://radd.it/r/listentothis/music
[+] [-] tjr|10 years ago|reply
Might help weed out the worst of the worst, while still helping to discover something that is mostly unknown.
[+] [-] Joeri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aczerepinski|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smtddr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themartorana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hit8run|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hluska|10 years ago|reply
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!!
[+] [-] david-given|10 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] mistagiggles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rplnt|10 years ago|reply
Also, it gives me lot of videos that don't exist (account termination).
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|10 years ago|reply
It seems to be a completely automated channel.
[+] [-] delgaudm|10 years ago|reply
A year ago and still, 4 million songs unplayed? Color me skeptical that they are updating thier list.
[+] [-] rspeer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bladegunner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanjones|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralphc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralphc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bopf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rspeer|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rlpb|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps they have, just not on Spotify.
[+] [-] bach_bach|10 years ago|reply
https://open.spotify.com/track/31hmuwgwJK0ktw4celrRcp
[+] [-] pizu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angerman|10 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] hluska|10 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] rprimrose|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanqui|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Drakim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onderkalaci|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iopq|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArekDymalski|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breakingcups|10 years ago|reply
Also worth pointing out that this was made by Spotify itself.
[+] [-] juliangregorian|10 years ago|reply