This month, Spotify celebrated its fifth year in providing music to the online masses. In line with this, the company shared an infographic highlighting some of its milestones, such as its growing number of premium subscribers (more than six million, as of March this year) and monthly active users (over 24 million, also as of March). While the post reveals things that we already know – “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk are the most streamed songs; Rihanna, David Guetta, and Coldplay are the most popular female artist, male artist, and band respectively – it unintentionally shared a pretty depressing fact: Out of the 20 million songs available on the music service, four million have yet to receive a single play or user view.
Obviously, Spotify won’t have a feature built in that will make it easy for you to find those attention-seeking music tracks – they’re in the business of providing you the best of the best, after all. But with such a humongous selection, it’s also very easy for aspiring musicians to get lost underneath all the top-hitters. While we wait for great suggestions such as creating an automated playlist comprised of untouched tracks that removes songs when someone plays them to be recognized by Spotify, we used the music app’s Popularity meter and search function to find songs that might not have received a single play.
‘Valentines For Lovers’ may be a cheesy name for a compilation album, but with remastered versions of movie soundtrack hits like Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” (from Top Gun) and Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (from Mannequin), not to mention Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” – OK fine, I’ll admit to having the original version of these tracks filed away in an unpublished Spotify playlist – how can you not give these songs a helpful bump?
And if you like hip-hop, Pusha T’s newest album needs your help – it’s got zero on Spotify’s popularity meter, despite doing well sales-wise (slated at the number four slot as of this writing).
Without giving the tracks a listen, I can tell you right now that it may be worth it – just check out the name of the collaborators! But anyway, here’s one he did with Pharrel:
This is a song entitled “Yolo.” Considering that the artist’s only other song is called “Phat Black Women,” it’s not at all surprising that both tracks have received absolutely no love from Spotify musicheads.
If you’re hosting a Halloween costume party sometime this month, it might be beneficial to check out Halloween Sound Effects, an account brimming with creepy ambient noise you can use to highlight your already rocking party playlist.
If you’re actively looking for songs that are low on ratings, it will definitely take you a while – I painstakingly entered cliché song title keywords like “love” and “sweet” and genres like “sound effects” and “instrumental” into the search function to find Spotify duds. But if you’re too busy to bother with such mundane tasks, here’s a track that pretty much summarizes what it means to be among Spotify’s 20 percenters:
