If you’re like me, then at least at some point over the last 20 to 30 years of the Internet’s existence you stopped briefly while surfing the World Wide Web to think, “I wonder how much of this has never been seen, read or heard before and has no purpose other than to take up space on a server somewhere?”
All right, maybe you didn’t put it that way. But I mean, it’s not such a strange thought. There are millions of people posting gazillions of odd curios and tidbits on the web every day. Surely a big slice of that is never seen again.
One little piece of proof to that theory popped up not long ago, when the music service Spotify announced that a full 20% of its music catalogue had never been listened to. No, not once. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of four million songs, just sitting there hoping that somebody might happen by for a quick listen.
It’s kinda sad, really. I ask you, wouldn’t even songs created by a tin-eared guy with a plastic bucket and a meat mallet deserve at least one listen? Some people think so.
With that mindset, a couple techy music fans decided to create a special Spotify browsing tool called “Forgotify.” The little app crawls Spotify’s catalogue and grabs random numbers that have never been played. And then after someone stumbles on the tune and plays it through (or, at least, winces through three-and-a-half seconds or so of playback), the tune is sent back to the musical netherworld from whence it came.
That raises the thought, though, that once that piece sinks back into its webby hidey-hole, it might never be heard of again. Its fugacious moment in the spotlight will, paradoxically, make it forever obsolete. (Much in the same way that I’ll likely never use the word “fugacious” ever again).
Here’s another thought: Forgotify is, in a way, making itself a flash-in-the-pan thing of obsolescence. Go with me on this. If the pace at which Forgotify pulls up songs for its listeners exceeds the rate at which Spotify piles in new forgettable stuff, the app could theoretically be eliminating any need for it to exist. You know, kinda gobbling itself up.
Now there’s a morbid, if geekily techy, idea.
So before I wander into any other creepy rabbit-trail thoughts of lonely Internet graveyards and self-eating apps, let me simply wish you a great and healthy day in this vast, and to a large degree, unexplored web of ours. Whatever you do, though … don’t get lost.
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