Back in October, music-streaming app Spotify published a blog post celebrating its 5th birthday. That post contained a bunch of stats about the first 5 years of operation, and one in particular struck a chord (or failed to, I guess). We looked through the data and saw that Spotify claimed only 80% of the over 20 million songs available on the service had been streamed at least once.
Do some incredibly easy math and you find that 20% of the songs on Spotify have never been streamed. Never. Not ever. Not even once. How sad, right?
Well, a new web app is looking to change that and give all these perviously unheard tracks their one moment to infect someone’s ears.
It’s called Forgotify, and it allows users to cycle through the roughly 4 million songs on Spotify that have never been played. Once it’s been heard, it’ll vanish from the Forgotify rotation.
On reddit, one of the people associated with the site says that “essentially all the songs belong to a sort of playlist, and we’ll refresh that playlist daily (if not more frequently), to keep only the songs with 0 plays.”
That means that if successful, Forgotify will give every song on Spotify at least one listen.
Of course, some tracks are unplayed for a reason – they simply don’t have the fan bases of let’s say, a more culturally relevant genre.
Taking a trip through the reddit thread on the service leads to to believe that people are stumbling upon some pretty obscure stuff. “African chants, obscure polka, and tons of opera,” says one user. “I just found a huge album of just machinery noises…” says another.
There are even some reports of “hippo sex noises.” Someone found an actual AA meeting on record.
Give it a shot. I know you’re just thinking about spinning Yeezus for the 457th time anyway.
Images via Forgotify