We’re still listening to all the songs on Spotify that have never been listened to before
Why is everyone listening to the same Rag'n'Bone Man song when they could be listening to Second-Hand Furniture?
Fun fact: one in five songs on Spotify, according to Spotify themselves, has never been played in full. With a library of about 20 million tracks, that means there’s about 25 years of music sitting on a server somewhere that’s never been touched.
Un-Herd Music, our new playlist series, aims to address that, ten tracks at a time. Every two weeks we’ll compile a motley selection of songs with a zero in their playcount column, chosen for their genius or obscurity, their curiosity or just plain WTF-value.
This time round, we top and tail the playlist with two very different approaches to instrumental guitar music, and centre it around four tracks that take us round the world: vintage bhangra from northern India follows Muscovite hip-hop, then Argentine tango from the 1950s leads us, perhaps most bracingly, into Australian folk singing via a little history lesson.
Chuck in some long-forgotten 1930s feminist blues, some gorgeously meandering hard-bop jazz, a slice of jangly indie and – who else? – the Hell City Rockers performing ‘Hellrocker’ (pictured, above) from their only album, ‘Hell City Rockers’, and you’ve got yourself a playlist to illuminate the darkest of Spotify’s corners.
See you in a fortnight.