There are, at the most recent count, “more than 70 million tracks on Spotify.” With a population of nearly nine billion, we could definitely get through all of them with a bit of team effort, but the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyonce are spoiling the effort by taking more than their fair share of listens.
But there’s a way to channel your inner teenage music snob and listen to music that literally nobody has heard before — well, not on Spotify, anyway. As spotted by TechRadar, Forgetiffy will immediately take you to one of approximately four million songs that have zero plays. You can then listen to yourself in the browser, instantly pocketing the artist responsible around NZ$0.0048.
Sadly, that’s likely all they’ll ever earn. Once you’ve listened to the unloved track, it has been played at least once and must therefore leave Forgetify’s library. But the site does let you share songs if you think you’ve found something truly remarkable, rather than something that’s just a bit bland.
Unfortunately, my personal experience with Forgetify was extremely short-lived. The site went down after I listened to one justly forgotten 30-second dance track from the 90s — the club edit of “Wild Life” by Desert Rose.
Clearly, the world just wasn’t ready for Desert Rose’s big return, but hopefully the site will be up and running again by the time you read this. It should be, given the project has been running since 2014.
If you want to take a break from listening to unloved music on Spotify, Petit Tube offers a similar service on YouTube, homing in on videos with next to no views, and giving you a small window into what someone once misguidedly believed was interesting enough to share with the world. Given that around 500 hours’ worth of video is being uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s safe to say that you’ll run out of time before the site runs out of material.
