Boasting about how unique one's taste in music is used to be an unquantifiable brag, but now, there's an app that can better discern just where you stand when it comes to uniqueness in taste of music.
Tapping into and ranking your Spotify listening history, Obscurify reveals details about your taste, such as how happy or how danceable the music you listen to is. Users also get a score based on the popularity of their top artists that allows them to compare their taste to that of the average Spotify user, revealing the "uniqueness" of their taste.
"The score is calculated based on the popularity of your favorite artists, determined by Spotify," explains Alex Olivero, the creator of Obscurify. "Each spot on the list is weighted differently—if your most popular artists are higher on the list, your score is going to be higher." If you listen to a lot of Drake, Kanye, or Kendrick, Olivero points out, chances are that you'll be closer to the average.
Spotify was an obvious choice for Olivero, thanks to its deep catalog and accessibility. "Tempo, key, how happy a song is, if it's major/minor—that's just scratching the surface. It's no wonder their recommendations are so great, they're analyzing every aspect of a track. As a programmer and music lover, seeing all that data was a beautiful thing."
With that said, he believes that Spotify has some minor improvements to make, like remedying how they make omissions in ranking a user's top artists of all-time, which could improve Obscurify in turn. Reddit users have also noted that Spotify doesn't necessarily categorize artists in their proper respective genres.
As for what's ahead, Olivero hopes to be able to incorporate Facebook friends so a user could directly compare his or her stats to those of his or her friends.
"This idea was actually central to the plan when I first began coding," he explains. "But I soon found out the difficulty level and time required to implement this is really high. So for now, my plan is to make little adjustments until I can get the time together to do it."
Explore Obscurify here to see how unique your musical taste is.
