While some people make a special effort to discover new music and expand their horizons, many of us stick to what we know, playing the same songs by the same artists in the same genres over and over again. Which is madness when you consider Spotify has 20 million tracks just sitting there waiting to be found and loved. Which is where Forgotify enters into the equation.

Unloved & Unplayed

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Forgotify is a Web app dedicated to delivering the unloved and undiscovered tracks no one has yet played on Spotify. There are -- or at least were before people started using Forgotify -- 4 million tracks that have never been played, not even once. That's 20 percent of the whole Spotify catalog that has racked up zero plays. Which is rather depressing when you think about it. Especially for the artists concerned.

Forgotify has pulled together these never-heard-on-Spotify songs, delivering them one at a time to those who are interested in something other than the Justin Biebers and Miley Cyruses of the world. To have never been played once means the tracks are usually obscure and/or sung in a language other than English.

Simple Yet Effective

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There really isn't much to Forgotify, but that's to its absolute credit. Assuming you're signed into Spotify, you simply visit Forgotify.com and click the 'Start Listening' button. A song will emerge from the gloomy backdrop to the site, a song that no one else has ever bothered playing on Spotify.

After the tingling sensation down your spine brought on by the realization that you're about to take your aural senses into the uncharted, you click 'Play' to break the digital tension and enjoy what follows. Or not. Because there's often a reason these songs have so far remained unheard until you came along and broke the spell. In other words, many of them are terrible.

Whether you were given a dud or a gem, the track plays both in the Forgotify player and in whatever other Spotify client you may have open. This can lead to confusion when the Forgotify track ends and another track plays immediately afterwards. This isn't a fault with Forgotify, it's just how Spotify keeps you listening for longer.

Uncovering Hidden Gems

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The song highlighted in the screenshot above isn't a hidden gem. It is, instead, an unlistenable mess of a song sung in a language I couldn't fathom; even Google Translate had trouble with it. However, not all of the songs hidden within the bowels of Spotify, just waiting to be discovered, are bad. Some are really rather good.

This is where Forgotify really proves its worth, helping you discover new songs you didn't know existed by artists you've never heard of in genres you thought were only popular on the Klingon homeworld of Kronos. If you are lucky enough to stumble upon a hidden gem then you can simply 'Star' it for future reference, add it to a playlist for future keeps, or share it via social networks so others can revel in the musical goodness you have found.

Mixed Emotions

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Using Forgotify in its present form brings a strange mix of emotions. Listening to a track no one else has ever listened to before on Spotify is rather thrilling, and not knowing what obscure composition you're going to get next makes this the best 'Random' button ever built. And yet there's also a tinge of sadness and regret involved, because once you play a particular track it disappears from Forgotify for ever, its single outing enough to lift it from the bottom of the pile.

Forgotify is, therefore, an ephemeral experience, that should, if the developers are playing by their own rules, run out of songs to play at some point in the near future. And its life will only be shortened more by articles like this extolling the virtues of Forgotify and imploring you all to go use it before it passes into history. Thankfully, there is a solution…

The Future Of Forgotify

All the developers of Forgotify need to do to keep this party going is change its mission slightly from playing tracks with zero listens to tracks with the least number of listens.

The tracks with the least number of listens could be delivered in order of unpopularity, or any tracks with a play count less than a specific number could be thrown into the mix and delivered at random. Either way, it means Forgotify has a future.

Still, in case this advice isn't heeded then you should take the opportunity to sample the service before it disappears. If you do give Forgotify a spin then please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Martin Belam, Kate Ter Haar