Understanding your Obscurify

Obscurify is one of the best known Spotify library analysis apps, going viral once or twice on social media--who doesn't want the opportunity to share their music taste? To some users, it can feel like the site pulls numbers out of thin air, but in reality, the site makes simple use of built-in features of the Spotify API, the same ones leveraged by almost all Spotify analyzers. Here are short explanations of how the different features of the site (probably) work, in order to explain the power of the Spotify API:

Your Top Genres: these are simply directly pulled from the Spotify API. Spotify has thousands of pre-defined genres which songs are assigned to.

Obscurity Rating: as the About Me page states, this score takes into account both global popularity and other Obscurify users. First, the program finds an obscurity score for your account, which is hidden from you. This is most likely done simply by taking a weighted average of your top artists. https://mainstream.ghan.nl/ does this process transparently:

Weight is directly proportional to number of streams in the selected timeframe, and your score is based on the number of listeners. % Mainstream is simply listeners divided by the most listened artist in the region (in this case Coldplay = 100%). However, this program is limited in that it only works with streaming data from last.fm and only uses popularity data from the UK, making it inaccurate or unhelpful for most users globally.

Once Obscurify has your secret numerical obscurity score, it simply looks at the score distribution for all users in your country and computes your percentile. You're not comparing yourself against other Spotify users, just the ones curious enough to use this app. Make of this what you will.

Your Most Obscure: the app then lists your supposed top five most obscure artists and tracks. These aren't just the least listened artists in your library; there seems to be a minimum number of plays required to get on the chart, around 50 for most users. Obscurify won't tell you your truly most obscure artists if they're under this threshhold.

Current Top Artists: again, simply taken from the Spotify API, which helpfully provides this list with just a query.

Your Moods: Spotify also helpfully gives every song 0-100 ratings in energy, danceability, valence, and acousticness. Valence simply refers to the happy/sad mood of the song, while the rest are relatively self-explanatory. To determine your scores in these categories, Obscurify uses the same process as it does for the big obscurity rating, however using category ratings instead of number of listeners. While Spotify also provides data for BPM, loudness, length, and popularity, Obscurify doesn't make use of this.

In summary, Obscurify simply makes use of simple Spotify API features. It's a neat and very well polished app, but doesn't use any crazy algorithms. I hope this article has been clear in its explanations of how Spotify API apps work. Thanks for reading!