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There's lots of buzz about Forgotify (http://forgotify.com) - a tool, that crawls Spotify against unplayed tracks.

Non-technical press articles say that they use Spotify API to crawl the songs and index only those with zero play count.

However, according to Spotify API documentation, such value is not available for single tracks:

https://developer.spotify.com/docs/apps/api/1.0/api-models-track.html

Similar question about possibility to retrieve track play count has also been answered here on StackOverflow (Get play count of a track from Spotify API) with similar results - that it's not possible.

I'm looking for a clue how Forgotify achieved what they claim they did. Any ideas? :)

Community
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Mateusz Papiernik
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1 Answers1

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The metadata api and libspotify provide the popularity score for songs. Perhaps they searched for tracks with popularity of zero. I don't know that zero popularity implies zero plays though.

They also could have implemented a remote control of the desktop client with some screen scraping. Or reverse engineered whatever internal communication the desktop does (though I suspect Spotify would have put a stop to that).

Thomas
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    Your suspicions are exactly the same as mine. It would be only logical to use zero pupularity as the index, but it does not imply zero play count. I have very quickly found a proof of a track played only several times, but still with zero popularity index. I wonder if they used "zero play count" as a media buzz, or found another way. – Mateusz Papiernik Feb 04 '14 at 14:49
  • Interesting. Perhaps an older version of libspotify provided playcount. Otherwise, the only place I know of that info is available is in Spotify clients. – Thomas Feb 04 '14 at 15:45
  • Seems so. I guess we won't find the definite answer after all. Thanks for your guesses! – Mateusz Papiernik Feb 05 '14 at 12:01
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    I also think they're using popularity. Unfortunately, that's not related to playcount much at all - if a hypothetical track gets played a lot then not at all for a long time after, the popularity could drop back down to 0 even though it was played a lot. Source: I work at Spotify. – iKenndac Feb 05 '14 at 14:00