Pitchify pretty much blew our minds last February, with its simple, effective approach to music discovery. All it did was mash reviews from Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound on top of Spotify, so that you could easily listen to whatever those blogs saw fit to rate 8.0 or higher. It still works.
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Little did we know that that same concept would form the basis of one of the most popular Spotify apps: Pitchfork, which is currently the No. 2 Spotify app in the App Finder. This started us thinking: What other music tastemakers would make a great Spotify app? After all, it's no fun having over 17 million songs to listen to if you just have to hunt them down individually, all on your lonesome.
- The John Peelizer
The late, great Radio 1 DJ John Peel discovered many of the most influential bands in the world before anyone had ever heard of them. A project is currently ongoing to digitize his massive record collection, but you know what would be even cooler? An app that could recreate his radio shows, or maybe just the Festive 50 playlists he created out of his favorite songs each year. Peel Player already does that, but our fictional John Peelizer would improve on it by using artificial musical intelligence to figure out what new music John Peel would have played, were he still with us.
- The Aquarius Newsletter-er
Aquarius Records is an excellent record store on Valencia Street in San Francisco that is still in business for some reason. For as long as I can remember, it has sent out an epic newsletter chronicling new releases of note, with painstaking reviews by its crack staff of people who are cooler than you. It would be great if they zapped the whole thing into Spotify as an app, so you could listen to what the reviews were talking about instead of thinking about maybe ordering the releases and then forgetting to bother.
- Former Record Clerk-ify
Aquarius is still in business, as mentioned above, but many, many record stores are not. It's a shame, because the people who worked there, when they weren't sneering at your Dire Straits CD, could recommend stuff you might like -- sort of like many of the music apps of today. After some sort of vetting process to ensure that these clerks are legit, Former Record Clerk-ify would gather their nuggets of wisdom into curated Spotify playlists. Bonus: If you listen to the "wrong" music and scrobble it to Facebook, the app would insult you upon its next use.
- College Radio-izer
If you're like the author of this post, one of your favorite things about college was DJing at the college radio station. It was the best -- except for the part about having to write down every single song that you played, which was a mandatory rule of the game. Someone, somewhere should take all of those old playlists and turn them into actual Spotify playlists, so that you'd be able to listen to certain days, specific shows, or entire years of your college radio station -- or anyone else's.
- Fired A&R Guy Radio
Before the record labels gutted their staffs, they hired legions of young hipsters to go see live music every night, reporting back on new artists that needed signing before some other label snatched them up. Fired A&R Guy Radio would function much the same way, using algorithms to scour new additions to Spotify for independent bands that are trending on Twitter and the blogosphere, as a way of identifying the best up-and-coming sounds for your listening enjoyment. Maybe you could even "sign" these bands to a fantasy roster, sort of like with TastemakerX, earning points if they take off.
