This Website Tells You Which Tracks Have Zero Plays on Spotify

Do you know exactly how many arm hairs you have? When someone asks how many stiches are on the passenger seat of your Toyota Yaris, can you answer confidently? Then you'll love Forgotify, the website for people that have done literally every other that thing there is to do.

The premise is simple: Forgotify randomly chooses one of Spotify's four million or so songs with zero plays for you and presents it to you to either play, share, or skip. If there ever existed a greater non-problem that didn't need solving we have yet to encounter it, but we'll be damned if we can't stop listening through their algorithmically-generated catalog.

We delved into the service with reckless abandon, hoping to find (and screenshot) outcast tracks by known musicians that had been abandoned by society. Unfortunately, even after several hours, we found none. All was not lost however, as we were able to make some logical conclusions based on the experience.

First, connection issues in China don't bode well for Chinese artists looking to attract mainland plays. If you're a multi-talented Chinese megastar or a traditional folk singer looking to break out of the southern provinces and make it big in the capital, you may want to use another platform—for now, at least. Roughly 25% of the tracks we were presented with were taken from unidentified albums by unidentified artists like the above.

If you're a German punk-rock band made up of four middle-aged men, half of which wear glasses, things are similarly bleak. Despite touring in 2005 and writing brief blog posts once a month in 2006, Jimmy Keith and His Shockey Horrors were unable to rack up any plays when their music was added to Spotify's collection several years later.

Were you hoping to make it big with your extensive collection of realistic sound effects? I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you. If a Parisian night traffic recreation wasn't eye-catching enough to garner a single play, your plans to recreate the sound of a blue whale trapped in an inner-city gymnasium will likely flop too.

Finally, 19th century opera composers and classical musicians alike are having a similarly hard time being heard on Spotify. Maybe it's because people that listen to opera don't know what Spotify is or maybe it's because people that choose to listen to opera at home passed away long ago. Whichever it is, even if you're a moderately successful composition duo such as Gilbert and Sulivan, you may want to stick to gramophones.

Can we pin the blame on Spotify for the lack of support that these artists have received? No, not really. If your music lies behind a communist government's firewall, fills a niche that nobody asked for, or was released to little fanfare in a time before Facebook, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Ziad Ramley is on Twitter: @ZiadRamley