Forgotify vs track play count in Spotify API

Question

There's lots of buzz about Forgotify (http://forgotify.com) - a tool, that crawls Spotify against unplayed tracks.

Non-technical press articles say that they use Spotify API to crawl the songs and index only those with zero play count.

However, according to Spotify API documentation, such value is not available for single tracks:

https://developer.spotify.com/docs/apps/api/1.0/api-models-track.html

Similar question about possibility to retrieve track play count has also been answered here on StackOverflow (Get play count of a track from Spotify API) with similar results - that it's not possible.

I'm looking for a clue how Forgotify achieved what they claim they did. Any ideas? :)

Answer 1

The metadata api and libspotify provide the popularity score for songs. Perhaps they searched for tracks with popularity of zero. I don't know that zero popularity implies zero plays though.

They also could have implemented a remote control of the desktop client with some screen scraping. Or reverse engineered whatever internal communication the desktop does (though I suspect Spotify would have put a stop to that).