Recent data from Spotify showed that 20% songs on the site have never been streamed, accessed, or searched for, even a single time by any user, leaving a large chunk of Spotify’s humongous library untouched. Services like Forgotify have already tried to remedy that situation by letting users play tracks that no one else has ever listened to. Now meet The Long Tail, a similarly designed web app that pulls the 50 least played Spotify tracks of any artist and lets you import them to the desktop Spotify application in a few clicks. The best thing about The Long Tail is that it gives you more control over what to play than Forgotify does. You can easily search for your favorite artist and begin streaming their songs right away.

Using The Long Tail to stream songs from Spotify is a straightforward process. No sign up is required, nor you will need to download anything to your computer provided you already have Spotify installed on your system.

Once you’re logged in to Spotify from its desktop application (I tested the app on Windows), simply head over to The Long Tail’s website via the link provided below. In the the search box, just type your favorite artist’s name and click ‘Play’ upon which the app will generate the playlist. The playlist is transferred to Spotify’s desktop app from where you can listen to the actual song. It should be noted that the app only searches for songs by artist name only, so if you usually type album names, you’re pretty much out of luck. One crazy thought: when you listen to a song on The Long Tail, and the desktop application is not already running, it won’t launch it automatically making users think the app isn’t working. Listeners also can’t share the track via social media integration.

Unlike Forgotify, however, TLT automatically excludes those tracks with zero popularity, as it seems they are not always the less popular ones. The developers cite that the service is built using the Polymer web platform and Spotify’s new web API. The source is on github (MIT license), and you can see how easy it is to create

All in all, The Long Tail is a really great way of finding songs that you may like but were never as popular as other songs by your favorite artists.

Visit The Long Tail

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