Some time ago, I built and showed HN[1] brew.fm, a tool helping artists remix each other’s work. It had been quiet, and I remembered how fun it was to work with the Spotify API, so I repurposed the tool to solve one of my own problems: missing out on new music of my favorite artists. I shared it on Reddit yesterday[2], and this seems to hit a spot for more people: so far 833 people connected their Spotify account.
How it works: The tool simply shows your top 50 artists on Spotify over short, medium and long term, and checks those artists for new music. If you select a playlist, every artist involved in the tracks will be checked for new music, after which new releases are shown sorted by most recent release date.
Here’s a video of me demoing the tool: https://youtu.be/Nh2Ognb4PgU. Enjoy! Very open to feedback.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29952633
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/wsq8rl/let_a_1000_...
If you're looking at expanding the feature set there's something I've been thinking of for a while, but haven't gotten around to it yet, and this looks miles better than anything I would cobble together. I really miss Apple's smart playlists[0] from when I used iTunes for my iPod. It was really easy to quickly make a playlist with songs with 4+ stars that I hadn't listen to for at least a month, and stuff like that. I think something similar should be possible to do with the Spotify API, with either manual updating on my computer, or automatic via a batch job on some server. Maybe even expand it to similar artists or something, to take advantage of having access to almost all music, not just my own collection. Imagine being able to create a playlist with 100 random trance songs from 1995-2005 with at least 50 000 plays, and having it updated daily, or the 50 most listened to pop songs right now released in 1980-2020.
The similar artist thing would probably be a good addition to this new releases feature to, to help you expand your horizon...
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/itunes/create-delete-and-use...
[0] http://playlistmachinery.com/index.html
I understand that via the API you can't get access to their whole graph and recommendation engine.
Currently when I like something I go to "artist radio" or "song radio" to find new things.
For a better discovery tool you need to use data from outside of Spotify
However. If the goal of this is to not miss out on artists you already know... Then it's simply a competitor to the "release radar" weekly playlist.
I've looked at the API reference [1] and couldnt find any of the stuff you mentioned, am I looking in the wrong place?
[1](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...)
Or finding similar bands from a similar time and area
I hope it’s ok to do a bit of shameless self promotion here on HN. I shared my open source Reddit Playlists project here as a Show HN post recently which aims to do exactly what you suggest by using Reddit posts.
The idea is pretty straightforward - Each week ~100 music subreddits are scraped for the most popular posts in the last week, and then a Spotify playlist is compiled with the tracks have been posted. Each playlist updates automatically every Sunday.
The main project page with a link to all the playlists is here: https://jameslawlor.github.io/reddit-playlists/
Code on Github: https://github.com/jameslawlor/reddit-playlists
I did find the service very useful for the 3ish years I used it, but I didn't jump to premium, and kinda stopped using it.
Curiously, what makes this service different and how will you ensure "100% perpetually free with no strings attached"?
https://www.musicbutler.io/
And to /u/bartproost - good luck with your new adventure! Your note on monetization reminds of myself 4 years ago when I'd just started with MusicButler. Luckily I didn't make any promises about it being free forever because, well, hobby projects have associated costs too.
Here's a demo of how I use Brew.fm to keep my 2 most used playlists up to date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh2Ognb4PgU.
I have no plans to monetize the tool. I'm scratching my own itch here and am very much at the mercy of Spotify. I'm hoping to keep this one a hobby project.
Not sure if the settings page is related, but that was when it started.
[1] https://spotifyreleaselist.netlify.app
Deleted Comment