News & Jukebox Chart

The forgotten tracks

This week a new online music service was launched that only plays songs that nobody has listened to on Spotify.

Apparently there are around 4 million tracks available on Spotify that have never ever been listened to. The aim of the new service, called Forgotify is to bring these tracks to the listeners’ attention.

Users have to log into Spotify to access these forgotten tracks, they are then presented with a piece of music and can press a ‘next’ button if they do not like what they hear. At this point they will be offered another unplayed track and so on.

The founders of Forgotify said that the four million unheard tracks were “a musical travesty”. I am not so sure…

While I applaud the concept of Forgotify for highlighting the unplayed and unloved on Spotify, I do question why they were not played in the first place. Radio 1’s Gemma Cairney put the new service to the test on Radio 4 this week. My ears nearly bled..

A seven-minute experimental instrumental track (thankfully Gemma only played around a minute) a Celtic ballad that haunted for all the wrong reasons – Forgotify is like a charity shop full of ‘finds’ that may be attractive enough but lead one to realize just why the items were donated in the first place.

VHub is able to offer well over 7 million tracks to customers via an online connection. But we are carrying out a ‘spring clean’ of our own. We know that there are a considerable number of tracks that have never been played and they never will be played (unless they suddenly become popular via Forgotify!).

We are therefore streamlining the offer to around 5 million tracks. We sincerely doubt that any of our customers or their customers will notice any difference at all, as these unloved tracks disappear. While we are sure that people will enjoy playing old forgotten tunes on their computers at home for a laugh, we know that our jukebox customers will not pay good money for them. But maybe we should just put them in a new category called “Forgotten tracks” and see if anyone wants to take the risk?!

Tagged in: Music News