MUSIC: Spotify and Forgotify - The Way We Listen Now

Everyone with a computer or smartphone will know about Spotify, even if they don’t really know what it is.  What it is is this – it gives the user the ability to make playlists of music from a massive online database and stream it. 

I groggily heard about a website on the Today programme last Thursday morning – Forgotify.com.  It plays songs which have never once been played on Spotify, which is a surprising 1/5ths of what is available.  Some of this is just boringly obscure (like some of the world music and mediocre renditions of classical pieces).  Some of it is batshit crazy. 

The amount of music available on Spotify is phenomenal – pretty much anything you can think of is there (apart from The Beatles, being as sticky as usual over the licensing of their music – remember how long it took them to come round to the idea of iTunes?  Perhaps after all the financial/legal complications they had during their messy divorce you can’t blame them.  I digress).  It’s been seen as controversial with some musicians – notably Thom Yorke – for the amount an artist receives from each play (not very much according to this BBC report.) 

I think of it as Napster in an age where music industry types are more accepting of the internet.  Napster came along in the 1990s and became essentially that decade’s version of the ‘Home Taping Kills Music’ hysteria of the 1980s.  In the 1960s the music industry worried that pirate radio would stop people buying records.  And so on – historically the music industry has always been suspicious at best of new technology.  But likewise, it always relatively adapts to it once the fuss dies down and they figure out how it can be used.  For instance, the establishment set up Radio One as an officially sanctioned popular radio whilst the pirates were edged out and shut down.

The real attraction of Napster was being able to hear something on demand.  Something the industry didn’t pick up on at the time (not just Execs either; Metallica famously lost a lot of credibility by seemingly siding with ‘The Man’).  It wasn’t a question of owning the music, especially because Napster was at its most popular before the proliferation of cheap MP3 players.  I remember how I used Napster as a teenager.  I would read about some song or band somewhere (normally the NME, for my sins) and want to check it out.  I would download a song or two, which would normally take an age, and if I wanted to hear more I would buy the CD.  It genuinely got me to buy things that I wouldn’t otherwise have – it was just a tool to direct my tastes and make sure my money was being given to the right bands.

Things change, and now the problem for the industry is definitely one of ownership.  The majority of people, enthusiastically or resignedly, have given up on CDs and have accepted digital media is just the way things are now.  It turns out we can live without pretty cover artwork and more shelf space.  So we download our music and pay for it through iTunes, Amazon etc if we're good law abiding citizens.  A lot of people see these sites as charging too much however, and download torrent files illegally for free from The Pirate Bay and the like.

Spotify and other sites like last.fm are largely successful attempts to thwart illegally downloaded files: people can stream music for free with adverts through their computers or upgrade for a tenner a month to get rid of the adverts and, more importantly, use it on the go on smartphones or other devices (like the app on my TV box).  This is actually a sensible and level-headed ‘damage limitation’ response by the industry to illegal downloading – the Spotify user gets their hands on music instantly and relatively cheaply without having to search for hours through dodgy torrent sites and the artist at least gets some money instead of none at all.

Spotify’s main selling point is the ability to find music you already know or may be curious about and make playlists.  Last.fm is designed to make surprisingly good suggestions based on tracks you tag as favourites, exposing the user to things they’ve never heard of (making it, as its name suggests, more like listening to a radio tailored to your tastes).  But both still require a certain amount of input on the user’s behalf to be truly effective.

Which is why I’ve loved messing around with Forgotify.  It feels completely anarchic although it isn’t, being based on a very strict rule – you will always be hearing something found on Spotify which no one else has listened to.  It feels anarchic though, because of the complete lack of logic in the playlist.  What you hear could be complete rubbish, but perhaps surprisingly, it isn't always.  The people who have set it up say it is “a musical tragedy” that some of this music has been ignored.  Speaking in terms of quality this is (understatement warning) not always true – I can live without the MOR stylings of Ray Lyell’s ‘Rollin’ Storm’ as part of my life, for instance.  It’s also not particularly tragic when the aforementioned mediocre classical pieces turn up, which I skip, ditto the religious stuff.

 

Forgetify - Bringing Obscurity Into Your Ears

However, it is tragic when you listen to the pop, and rock songs and remember they were recorded by real people who were in that studio, however long ago, wondering if they were making their first number one.  Putting their heart and soul into mediocre songs like ‘I Gotta Know’, by Boy from 1983 and not knowing that they won’t even be famous enough to turn up on a Google search – which, you know, not being on Google is even less than being a footnote to history.  That’s just being left out of the book altogether. It also gives some of the happier, soulful and music a melancholic and almost creepy feel.  I have decided that I really like The Esso Steelband Of Bermuda’s 1958 ‘Bermuda Honeymoon’ album, but listening to it and knowing that it is essentially unloved by millions of people creates, entirely in hindsight, an eerie atmosphere, despite its upbeat sunny vibe.

These are creative people who tried and failed.  The boys and girls at the party that, in the end, nobody wanted to talk to.  It is heartbreaking listening to songs from Forgotify bearing this in mind, listening to all this unrequited optimism and enthusiasm.  It makes you want to listen to some awful songs out of an irrational sense of guilt. 

It’s refreshing to have something like Spotify – which is designed to give the user complete control over their listening – and perversely using it to listen to things proved beyond doubt to be hugely unpopular, and it’s the kind of subversion that could only happen when we take having everything at our fingertips for granted.  It's undoubtedly pleasureable mainly for the novelty factor and I don't count on it being more than a fad (if it even gets as far as becoming a fad); but it's certainly an enjoyable experiment, and serves to remind us how much of a disposable commodity music is.