Notsohotify might just be the best way to find new music

Titled Notsohotify, the app works through Spotify to generate playlists based on low popularity ratings. Now, although it sounds like it generates playlists that are a bit crappy, it actually draws from pools of noise that are totally untapped - it's not about bad music, it's just about unknown music. Some is pap, for sure, but there are gems nestled in there from bands you'd never know existed otherwise. Just be prepared to suffer the odd polka ditty. You can check it out here.

The main aim is to "explore the weird, interesting, stupid and amazing world of unpopular music", and sift through the millions of tracks on Spotify that go unlistened.

All you need to get started is a Spotify account and the ability to click a button.

Speaking about the app, Herman Brolin told Best Fit:

"Having had a working beta for quite a while (two years, ehum...), we know there’s a ton of unpopular gold to be found! And with the type of playlists you get with Notsohotify, the chocolate box factor is pretty high, to say the least... we have found so much amazing music while working on this project. The first time we got it to actually work and generated our first playlist… Man, both me and Alexander were blown away! The mix we got was insane. A track by a New York death metal band was followed by a Latin track recorded in 1992 and after that came some (very) Italian love songs. In the beginning we never skipped a track on our Notsohotify playlists, they all just felt too precious. Now we, or at least I, have decided it’s allowed to skip a track or two per playlist. But never more than two, you never know what you could miss!

I have found some great old jazz, like Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz band, a lot of good blues, metal and also things it’s hard to believe actually exists, like this one. Great stuff, fun stuff and crazy stuff from artists no one ever heard of (sometimes for a good reason). I have learned about artists and bands that turns out to actually be known, or at least half-known in south Germany, but that were new to me. My own music consumption has gotten to another level after we got Notsohotify from a fun idea to a working app.

I personally hope more people will realize that unpopular music doesn’t have to mean bad music. I hope more people will find some of all the unpopular gold that’s out there. All it takes is some digging, and I believe we have made that digging a bit easier with Notsohotify. Me and Alexander have used Notsohotify in beta at work and at home for a while, and we've even hosted parties with only music from Notsohotify allowed. Oh the fun you can have with randomly generated unpopular music for a whole night!"

The pair have also detailed a few future features that they're keen to integrate following the success of the app's launch:

Instant artist/track info

I personally love finding out more about interesting artists, bands and songs I find on Notsohotify. And I love all the amazing and sometimes absolutely unbelievable album covers that shows up. For anyone like me I think it would be a great feature to have a section onthe app, next to the tracks in your current playlist, showing a larger image of the album cover and an excerpt of the bo for the current artist and some info about the song, like the year it was released. There is always a story behind every song, this way we cold be telling the stories that are normally never told.

Adding a voting system
When you find something great you will be able to recommend that track. A recommended track will be added to a list with all tracks recommended by other users. On that list people can vote on tracks they like. That way we will get something pretty amazing: a top list that’s actually a bottom list, a top of the bottom list.

Filtering
The perhaps most powerful feature that really could change the way we look for music is adding filtering to Notsohotify. We’re looking in to the possibilities of that… Just imagine how powerful this tool could be for anyone looking for something specific but truly unique if it was possible to set up your personal filter before generating a new Notsohotify Playlist! Say you want music only from the USA (or Sweden, or Russia, or maybe Cuba), in the a certain genre, released between let’s say 1930 and 1965. Set up you filters and hit Generate. Boom! Any DJ, music editor or just anyone who loves music should have a new extremely powerful tool available to them anytime, anywhere.