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by phaedrus 1052 days ago
A feature I've long desired would be to be able to ask what lies between or along the average or sum of the vectors representing two arbitrary songs or bands. For example what music is midway between "Florence and the Machine" and "Primus"? Or, what happens if you take the vector from Green Day to Modest Mouse and extend it - do you land on another (presumably obscure indie) band?

If Spotify won't give me those toys, are such things possible via the API that Spotify has provided?

3 comments

I mean... Spotify tracks a bunch of cool (algorithmically measured) sets of metadata for each song. Basically the ones you have on this site. And there are APIs to retrieve them for any song, and you can use them all as arguments for search. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to find a thing in between two things.

Keep in mind that the actual accuracy of those metrics is debatable. They are cool... But mostly for funzies, or for approximate sorting in 3rd party tools.

If I understand correctly, what I'm getting back from their API is basically what lies between, but without any of the interesting data they're using the do the calculation. One can hope, but I'd imagine that data is priceless to them and won't ever be available to us.
There's a webapp called Boil the Frog that does exactly this!
This is very cool, hadn't heard of it before. Thanks.
Cheers, going to give it a look.