Recent data from Spotify showed that there are a lot of very lonely tracks on its servers. Tracks that just sit there, passing the time of day, doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Never searched for. Never accessed. Never played.
The music streaming giant even put a figure on it, revealing that about four million of its tracks – that’s about 20 percent of its entire catalog – have never been streamed.
Feeling a bit sorry for these solitary songs, a small team of music lovers set up Forgotify, a service that seeks out never-visited Spotify music and gives those lonely tracks a chance to know what it’s like to feel wanted.
The set-up is simple enough. Once you’re logged in to Spotify, you just head over to forgotify.com where you’ll be presented with a track that’s never been streamed. Then it’s just a matter of hitting the play button and having a listen. If you like it, you can share it. If not, just hit the ‘next’ button for another unplayed track.
You might come across Ayre Rayde’s funky Sock It To Me, or possibly Barry and Holly Tashian’s tuneful Heaven With You (recorded live in Holland), or even Mahir Burekovic’s remarkable Ti si mi zena najdraza. The tracks cover a huge variety of genres and appear to be a varied mix of established artists from around the world to newer bands and singers looking to make it big.
Forgotify is the brainchlid of Lane Jordan, J Hausmann, and Nate Gagnon, who say on their website that it’s nothing short of “a musical travesty” that so many songs sit silently on Spotify’s servers, although after listening to some of them, the term “musical travesty” may come to mind once again.
To remedy the situation, the trio set out to “give these neglected songs another way to reach your ear holes.”
The team recently told Time magazine about how they created a special program to seek out the unstreamed music, with the software designed to refresh its database of unplayed tracks each day, removing any that have been accessed. According to Jordan, the number of never-streamed songs on Spotify is actually growing with new music being added all the time, so unless Forgotify becomes really popular, it’s unlikely to run out of offerings anytime soon.
Of course, with Spotify reportedly paying between $0.0084 and $0.006 per stream, a single play on the music streaming service won’t change a budding musician’s life. However, should the listener like the track and share it, you never know, it might be the start of something.
