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. Ever.
Forgotify is a new Web site that proposes, “Let’s change that,” as it says on its homepage.
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. Luba, a Canadian singer, is followed by a classical track, which is followed by Miluše Voborníková’s “Baletka Lenka,” a folkish foreign-language tune — which language? No idea — that has the vibe of a children’s song with punctuations of hand-claps.
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.
Spotify is home to seven of his albums, but Keane, 67, says he’s slow to adopt new technology and isn’t all that interested in the streaming music site. The tracks were posted on Spotify by Keane’s various record companies.
He understands that traditional Irish music may not be the most popular offering online.
“None of us will ever get paid for being on MTV,” says Keane, who has performed at Carnegie Hall. “You’ll never get rich playing traditional Irish music. We play it because of what it represents.”
Keane may not be rich, but offline, he’s sold some tens of thousands of physical records, and Italian instrument-maker Castagnari honored him with a signature accordion called the Keanebox.
The next track we were served up by Forgotify was something called “Part Six” from a Danish jazz musician named Fredrik Lundin. It’s a modern, saxophone-driven composition punctuated by female vocals.
Lundin, 51, has two albums on Spotify, and he says that “Part Six” was written after he returned from a stint studying at New York City’s New School. The full-time musician now lives in Copenhagen.
“That this is song on Forgotify doesn’t surprise me, it being on an old Danish jazz album and all,” Lundin says of the 1993 composition, which came off a record nominated for a Danish Grammy. “I like the idea, however, that this song, and hopefully the rest of the album, now might get a little attention this late in life.”
Whether that attention might turn into dollars is another story. Lundin says Spotify is only useful for promotional purposes.
“The income we musicians get from people streaming our music is laughably small — virtually non-existent,” he says.
For that one play via Forgotify, Spotify will reportedly pay Lundin less than 1 cent.
Talk about forgotten.