Less Than 1,000 Spins

A new playlist full of hidden gems.

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Hello everyone. It’s been a minute. Wishing you all the best in the new year.

We live in a world of abundance. There’s an unprecedented amount of music easily available on our laptops and phones. If you use a streaming service with any regularity the vast number of choices feels suffocating at times.

Unfortunately, streaming services don’t seem very interested in helping smaller artists break through and find an audience. Though Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek somehow convinced himself it was worth investing $250 million in Joe Rogan’s podcast (yikes), he has been decidedly more tight-fisted when it comes to musicians. The company recently confirmed that it won’t pay artists for songs with fewer than 1,000 streams. It’s a pretty indefensible decision if you ask me.

That said, I still use Spotify to make playlists and share music and will probably continue to use it for the foreseeable future. In light of their recent decision, I decided to revisit a project from several years ago - a playlist full of great songs with under 1,000 plays. (I should note that I’m far from the first person to think of this.)

I actually started a playlist like this back in 2018 but only added a few songs and then abandoned it. So I decided to revive it, name it Less Than 1,000 Spins, and make a YouTube counterpart. There will be some differences between these playlists since the streaming stats vary from platform to platform, though they do have a number of the same songs.

These are great recordings by talented artists. They deserve to be heard. The ultimate goal, of course, is to help these songs surpass 1,000 plays and to get their creators a bit more visibility. (I also plan to make a separate playlist for songs that surpass 1,000 plays and can no longer be on Less Than 1,000 Spins.) Any effort on your part to like the playlist, listen to it, forward it to a friend, and/or share it on social media is more than appreciated.

That’s it for now. Enjoy. I hope you find some new music that you love.

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