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.<p>For example, here's the GET tracks/:id endpoint: <a href="https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/get-track/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/get-track/</a><p>The closest thing to a play count is the "popularity" value, which is described as thus:<p>> <i>The popularity of the track. The value will be between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most popular.<p>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.<p>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>
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.<p>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.
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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__d0M400nM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__d0M400nM</a><p>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.<p>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.
Previously: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149839" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149839</a><p>A year ago and still, 4 million songs unplayed? Color me skeptical that they are updating thier list.
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.
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.<p><a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/31hmuwgwJK0ktw4celrRcp" rel="nofollow">https://open.spotify.com/track/31hmuwgwJK0ktw4celrRcp</a>