We’ve decided to start listening to all the songs on Spotify that have never been listened to before
Why is everyone listening to the same Drake song when they could be listening to Johnny Suxxx and the Fucking Boys?
Fun fact: one in five songs on Spotify, according to the streaming service themselves, has never been played in full. With a library of about 20 million, 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. Each week we’ll compile a motley selection of tracks with a zero in their playcount column, chosen for their genius or obscurity, their curiosity or just plain WTF-value.
In our inaugural playlist, we kick off with melancholy doo-wop (The Jive Five, pictured), skinny post-punk and a pair of luxurious orchestral instrumentals from the 1960s. Then, Johnny Suxxx and the Fucking Boys give new depth and meaning to the term “cock-rock”, Asha Bhosle (she the subject of Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’) transports us to Bollywood in 1969 with one of the 12,000 45s she’s recorded in her 75-year career. Between those, there’s a gloriously odd excerpt from a sound-effects record.
We round things out with a none-more-Todd Rundgren slab of yacht-rock, a song that could be off the second Postal Service album, and finish magnificently with ‘Party Like A Fucking Bitch’, the title track from the only album by – who else? – Bitch Machine.