What is Obscurify? Find how unique your music taste is during your wait for Spotify Wrapped

Obscurify is an innovative Spotify-based app that provides users with numerical data about their music tastes, using their listening history. It also allows users to explore and compare others’ music tastes with their own.

Spotify users are eager to boast about their streaming summary to others via Wrapped 2022. While waiting for Wrapped, users can tap into Obscurify.

The platform was developed by Nirmal Patel and Alex Olivero, and was created with the goal of helping listeners with a better understanding of their music taste.

The app lets users evaluate if their taste in music is basic or unique compared to others. It uses Spotify's Web API and analyzes users’ streaming history to find out one’s top genres and recommend songs accordingly. Obscurify also makes a playlist for users, compiling songs from their existing track lists. These songs can then be added to users' Spotify library as well.

Obscurify breaks down one’s music moods – whether it’s happy or danceable. Comparing the popularity of the streamers’ top artists, each of them is given a score. It’s a marker of how unique their taste is.

Alex Olivero explains,

"The score is calculated based on the popularity of your favorite artists, determined by Spotify. 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."

Olivero points out that if someone’s most listened-to artists are Kendrick, Drake, or Kanye, they’re likely to score closer to the average. He further reasons why he chose Spotify among all the other music streaming apps,

"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."

The developer also expressed his hopes to integrate a feature to directly compare one’s Obscurify stats with their Facebook friends. He explained that the idea was "central" to the plan when he started coding. However, he soon realized that the difficulty level and the time needed to implement his idea was "really high." So he says:

"For now, my plan is to make little adjustments until I can get the time together to do it."

However, he thinks Spotify could do with some minor improvements. For example, the app often omits artists while ranking a listener’s all-time top artists. It also affects the results of Obscurify since it only collects data from Spotify.

Some users on Reddit have also shared that Spotify doesn’t always consider the correct genres for artists while categorizing them.

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How to find out your Obscurify score?

There are only a few simple steps to get your Obscurify stats. Visit https://obscurifymusic.com/login and log in using your Spotify account. Your Spotify data will be quickly analyzed by the website and you’ll receive a score judging the uniqueness of your musical preferences.

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The "Open Summary" option at the bottom of the scorecard will give you a detailed overview of your top genres, artists, and tracks. Scrolling down, you’ll come across a graph. It is to compare your music taste with others living in different countries.

Next, the site will showcase your most obscure artists and most obscure tracks. Your different moods will also be analyzed and rated based on their danceability, happiness, energy, and acousticness.

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There’s another interesting slide that lets users know about their music decades. It will show them the decades – songs from which they stream the most. This is to give users an idea of how mainstream or unique their taste is. Whether the user only streams music from the current decade or cultivates tracks from earlier years as well.