“While you’re busy listening to that Beyoncé song for the ninth time today on Spotify, consider this: nearly 20 percent of the tracks on the digital music service — some 4 million songs — have never been played,” Reed Tucker reports for The NY Post. “Ever.”
“Forgotify is a new Web site that proposes, ‘Let’s change that,’ as it says on its homepage,” Tucker reports. “When someone visits the site, Forgotify randomly serves up these virgin tunes, one by one. It was created by a San Francisco art director named Lane Jordan and a few friends, and works by crawling Spotify to figure out which songs register play counts of zero.”
“The mix is eclectic, to say the least,” Tucker reports. “The Post randomly sampled a few more songs, then tried to get in touch with the artists. Turns out, we found one literally next door to the newspaper’s Sixth Avenue offices. Forgotify had selected ‘Father Kelly’s/Green Fields of America’ by an Irish accordion player named James Keane. As it happens, Keane works at a Midtown bank.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
They get praised by members of Pink Floyd for just being on Spotify.
Cause…. iTunes..
Crabapple hereby judges that Forgotify will cause Spotify to be forgotified! 🙂
Maybe i’m in the minority, but I’m all in with iTunes radio
I’m in the minority… I like YouTube for music. I swear, no matter how obscure a title I can think of, it’s there. A friend and I were thinking of the best Jazz Bassists and compiling a list and we got to Stanley Clarke. School Days is one of Clarke’s definitive signature titles, but we found this version that I’d never heard. Tons of stuff like this on youtube.
You have to suffer Google following you around later trying to sell you a bass or a bass guitar but it’s worth it.
As a soundtrack music fanatic, YouTube is THE motherlode of good stuff…even found a video of André Previn interviewing the great Miklós Rózsa, then conducting his Main Title to Ben-Hur. Great stuff.
Jeezus. Stanley is one of the best ever. I was never much into his forays into piccolo/tenor/etc. basses, but man, on the standard bass guitar and bass viol the guy is a monster and has always been one of my top faves. Thanks for the vid.
Victor Wooten. The best jazz bassist in the world….EVER!
Jaco Pastorius
Heavenly Jane! (as my Graffy used to say). Count on you, Glenda dahling, to read my mind. Between Jaco Pastorius and Mick Karn, the fretless bass will NEVER be the same again. I love these guys, both of whom have sadly left the material world.
<> Glenda. Sorry I’ve been out of touch.
As a mere slip of a girl, I saw him with Weather Report, audacious on stage wearing a baseball cap, I identified with him as a shortstop. In baseball and in jazz timing is crucial. He demolished my previous experiences of music and of performance art, with his idiosyncratic squeezing and wringing out of themes, as da Vinci once had done. He was not left handed like Leonardo and me but he had the sinistro consciousness; — broken symmetry.
as great as YouTube is for music, it is even greater (to me) for history. There is hardly any subject that there aren’t tons of documentaries on from all perspectives. A cheap Logitech BT keyboard for searches plus an AppleTV and you’re set to explore nearly every facet of human endeavor.
YouTube is great not because of Google, but because of the countless hours from countless users who have selflessly digitized and uploaded files…kinda the same with Wikipedia.
And just where are these users getting all these Analog videos that they are tirelessly Digitizing? You think there’s a vast supply of hidden 35mm movies out there?
They aren’t getting them from Google. They are digitizing old tapes from every corner of the world. For many of those, copyright status is questionable but if no one complains of infringement, Google levels them one.
Botvinnik -go away
YT is how I find new bands. It is extremely rare when I cannot find even the most obscure doom metal band there.
Allan Holdsworth and Clarke Stories to Tell
https://itunes.apple.com/album/stories-to-tell/id186385434?i=186385871&ign-mpt=uo%3D5
Land of the misfit songs.
Let me buy what I want to hear when I want to hear it.
Steaming I is popularizes by dimwits who like the word “streaming” and think it’s somehow a cool thing or a magical thing or something. What it actually is is “rent a song”. You don’t own it and you don’t control it. Just absurd!
The idea of streaming is like going to the movies. You rent a seat to stair at a screen for 90 minutes for $9. The marketers promote specific films and put out things they feel will appeal to the masses. Many great movies never see the light.
Tunes suffer worse. The record industry promotes ‘pop’ (popular) based on what sells the most. Popular is many times not the same as good.
The idea of streaming is to give (starving) artists the opportunity to have their songs heard even if record companies turn them down. Many times these songs are great.
Forgotify is a fantastic idea. Unknown songs (un-marketed) don’t get played. And this platform seems like a way to market unknowns.
I wish them the best of luck
me too, for the same reasons you specified.
If the songs haven’t been played at all, or if they’ve been played thousands of times, there’s virtually no difference in how much the musicians get paid.
Sad but true..
Perhaps. However, this may explain why there is so little money in selling music. It is simple supply and demand. Supply is through the roof but demand is limited.
Indeed SG 👏
That’s why Tyler swift pulled all her stuff from all of them. At least on conventional broadcast media the artists get royalties which are far greater than spotify , rdo I❤️radio etc.
The only ones who are getting anything are the steaming companies. The artists get nothing except having their art dumbed down to virtually Muzak.
Oops, Taylor Swift not Tyler 😎 guess that shows my age, I can’t stand most pop nowadays. So bland and sterile or thumping bullshit.
Ya fergot to say “and get off my lawn!”
Not to mention over-normalized and distorted with the usual over-used me-too production techniques from clueless artists, producers & engineers.
What happens to songs that zero people listen to on Spotify?
Ballmer copies them onto his Zune.
and never listens to them either.
Songs like this are probably toast with modern audiences (and maybe for good reason). The flip side of the 45rpm record was the same song played in reverse – even fewer plays!
Thank you PeterBlood71 for reminding me of listening to Doctor Demento during the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s creating mix tapes of the funniest/puniest songs. I am SLOWLY in the process to finding the tapes and converting them to MP3’s. I have to give a shout out to the software, Amadeus Lite, by Hairier Soft – which is in the App Store – for making the conversion possible. Their user guide is excellent and provides a very good (a little on the technical side) overview of various file types related to digital audio.
Demento was great, found a great niche in music. Still awaiting other little played & reviled music – like a 5 CD box set of Leonard Nimoy albums! What was Dot Records thinking? Heh.
Does this remind anyone else of ‘Twin Peaks’?
Turn me on dead man.
Missed opportunity. 🙂
Was listening to iTunes Radio at work this weekend. It is getting better, but still has some very strange choices for mixes s you make a station on a song or artist.