An Accidental Repository of Niche Music on Spotify ⇥ boingboing.net

Annie Rauwerda, Boing Boing:

A decade ago, when Spotify was two years old in the UK and had just become available in the US, Chris Johnson started a musical discovery project called TAPEFEAR. He “created a script to find new music on niche music sites, cross reference Spotify to see if it was available to stream,” according to a Reddit post, and besides a bit of occasional tinkering, he largely forgot about it. In total, Johnson says the script ran for a decade amassing 42,000 songs.

According to Johnson, it is actually 42,000 albums on TAPEFEAR. With all this choice, it makes you wonder why first-party playlists on these streaming platforms often feature music from off-brand production houses if not because of lower royalty payout rates, which Spotify has denied.