How to search for low-plays tracks?

[nede_0101]

Hey - first time user.

I'd like to explore less popular music by searching for tracks of a particular genre with less than some number of plays.  But I can't find  way to do that.  Is there a way?  I'm using the web player.

Thank you.

[Sebasty]

Hey @nede_0101

I don't know how to search for something like that in Spotify, but I have something better to offer 🙂

Spotify has a dedicated website for genres, it's called Every Noise At Once and it's a cloud of different genres available on Spotify.
If you pick a genre you're interested in and click on the little >> arrows next to the genre name, it will take you to the genre's page. In the upper part of the genre's webpage are various playlists - Playlist, Intro, Pulse, Edge, 2017.
Edge is the playlist that contains new and lesser known music.

Others:
Playlist - a pretty thorough playlist on the genre in question. The Sound of Gangster Rap for example.

Intro - a shorter introduction to the particular genre.

Pulse - songs of the genre that are currently more frequently listened to

2017 - the genre's fans favourites of 2017.

Scan will play a random sample on the webpage.

If you click on the genre or artist name itself, it will play a short audio preview. I recommend turning the volume downwards a bit, some samples can be loud. 🙂

Hope that helps!

[nede_0101]

Hey - yes, that IS very helpful, thank you.  

So many new questions arise.  Can I delve into it with you?

Is Every Noise actually run by Spotify?

Is this the list of all existing genres on Spotify?  So if it's not on this page, it doesn't exist, don't waste my time searching for it?  And I suppose in reverse, if you're an artist, you have to fit into one of these?

The size of the text labels - does that represent the number of tracks, or the popularity?

OK - this is a cool tool.  But, at the risk of being difficult - it still means depending on someone, or some algorithm, to present tracks to me.  I've read there are millions of never-played tracks on Spotify - The Edge playlist seems to give me about 20 tracks.  Hoping they were randomly selected, I hit re-load - same 20 tracks.  Is there no way to drill down to those millions of hidden gems?

Thanks again.

[Sebasty · Accepted solution]

@nede_0101

Oh these are good questions and I don't know the true answer to some, but I try to shed a bit more light on it 🙂

The page is run by Spotify, more specifically created by and maintained by Spotify's own data alchemists. You should see more information about the page and the creators when you scroll downwards on the main page. I recommend looking into these links.

Most specifically the Needle link as it's all about the obscure and unknown material. Read the "What is this?" link to learn more about that particular machine/feature.

The playlists are partly refreshed every week. About 5%-15% of songs remain from previous weeks, all the rest is replaced with new material.

While I'm not really sure about the genre questions, I recommend reading this pdf file that's also linked on the website. It has some interesting information.

About the boldness/size of the genres and artists, I would say that more popular ones are bolder than the lesser-known ones.

I can't really think of a better or easier way of digging deep into the unknown on Spotify. I sometimes search random phrases on Spotify and then queue the results for playback, but that's me being bored (I have found interesting stuff that way).

Edit: Found a website that's dedicated to songs that have never been played. It's called Forgotify and it's a pretty cool service in my opinion.
You don't get control over what to play next, but that doesn't really matter in these cases.

Hope that helped! 🙂

[nede_0101]

Thank you once again for so much interesting and helpful information.

I actually did do some of my own research and was already aware of Forgotify.  But  hadn't seen the Needle link.

These are very cool tools, don't get me wrong.  But - and I hate to sound critical - neither of them let you specify a genre.  I don't want to listen to hundreds of pop, rap and hip-hop tunes hoping for a folk song to randomly pop up if I'm into folk.  And, once again, I'm limited to the tunes they chooose to display.  For example, the Needle shows 100 tunes - of which only a handful are going to be in the genre I'm looking for.

Now, Forgotify - what's interesting there is that apparently it IS possible to identify tracks with few plays - because they do it.  So how?

And if Spotify is listening - hey guys, nice music service - but could you please make the search engine so we can search something like "genre:folk + plays<1000 + year<2010"  That would be awesome.

[Sebasty]

@nede_0101

About Forgotify - yeah! I've been wondering too how they have managed to find these tracks. "Forgotify is built upon a database that the trio created to crawl Spotify's API for pieces with a play count of zero."

The idea of being able to search for songs with less than x plays is really nice! I recommend going to the Ideas board in this Community and making an entry there. 🙂

[Alice421]

This question was asked in 2018. It is still a valid question that has NOT been solved by any of the answers above (and it is now 2024). Spotify still doesn't allow a search by number of listens.