Thor Benson profiles Lane Jordan and Nate Gagnon, co-founders of Forgotify:
Jordan discovered that 20 percent of Spotify’s library had never been heard—not even once. He brought on his friends J. Hausmann and Nate Gagnon to help with a project that would put a spotlight on those unsung heroes of music. Forgotify scans Spotify’s API for songs that have never received a single play and puts them in the library to be heard. The rest is up to curious listeners. … The temporal beauty of Forgotify is its fleeting existence. “If it’s successful, it shuts itself down,” Gagnon said. “We heard somewhere that it would take 200,000 people listening for an average of an hour to knock out all the songs—which makes it sound more attainable than we thought.”
Katie Collins tried it out:
Wired.co.uk has taken Forgotify for a whirl to see if it unearths any buried treasures. Among various Bollywood songs and cuckoo noises from a sound effects album, we came across a bearable country-style track The Crazies by folk rock ensemble New Mongrels. Obviously there is a very good reason some of the songs on Spotify have never been played, but we also discovered some Mozart and Bach in the mix, which just goes to show that reputation doesn’t guarantee you anything these days.
To use Forgotify, you have to be signed into Spotify and head to the website, which uses an embedded player that provides you with randomly generated unplayed songs. It will try its hardest to mix up genres, so you’re not listening to similar stuff back to back. But while it makes for a diverse listening experience that will certainly expose you to things you never knew existed, it’s unlikely to hit the spot in the same way as your own carefully curated playlists.
The Dish 