Boil The Frog, in conjunction with Spotify, is the perfect way to fool your friends into liking your style of music. Really though, you could get a friend who loves Bon Iver, to listen to a cohesive playlist that ends with Joey Bada$$, or maybe take them from Kings Of Convenience to Lana Del Rey. 'What sorcery is this?' you may ask. We'll reveal the magic and hand over the wand.
How Boil The Frog Works
After accessing the app, plug in two artist names (e.g. Migos; Marilyn Manson) and click 'boil the frog.' In turn, this creates a playlist which takes you from the one artist to the other, through a series of other artists' songs in a seamless flow. If the playlist isn't up to scratch, Boil the Frog allows you to skip certain songs by clicking 'bypass,' and if you'd prefer a different track by the same artist you can simply click 'new track.' At the very end there is an option to connect your Spotify account to Boil The Frog and save the playlists.
The best of Cuco, right here on Spotify. Our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Coo. Smarter Playlists is a web app that lets you build complex playlists by assembling simple components. Here are some examples of how to do stuff with Smarter Playlists. Click on an example to open the program and try it for yourself.
That's the nitty gritty of the app, the interesting part comes in with the algorithm. Using Echo Nest's artist similarity, an artist similarity graph of about 100,000 popular artists is built and used to navigate a path between two artists. And as they've so brilliantly explained, 'if you start and end with a popular artist, you are more likely to find a path that takes you though other popular artists, and if you start with a long-tail artist you will likely find a path through other long-tail artists.'
For instance, a developer can request via the Echo Nest playlist API a playlist seeded with a Spotify artist ID and receive Spotify track IDs in the results. This morning I created a Spotify App that demonstrates how to use the Spotify and Echo Nest APIs together.
Who Created Boil The Frog
Boil The Frog App
Boil The Frog was built by Paul Lamere, who is naturally pretty chuffed about the uptake of his app.
If you want to check it out, click here.
Now that that's all covered, make way for shameless self-promotion: follow us on Spotify for the best of indie music.
Image Source: Pixabay
Update – You are probably looking for this web-based version of Boil The Frog and the blog post about it.
The rest of this article is about the unreleased Spotify Version of Boil the Frog.
I’m at Music Apps Hack Weekend doing my favorite thing: hacking on music. I’ve just finished my hack called Boil the Frog. Boil the Frog is a Spotify App that will create playlists that gradually take you from one music style to another. It is like the proverbial story of the frog in the pot of water. If you heat the water gradually, the frog won’t notice and will happily sit in the pot until it becomes frog stew. With Boil the Frog you can do the same thing musically. Create a playlist that gradually takes your pre-teen from Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis, or perhaps more perversely the Kenny G fan to Cannibal Corpse.
To build the app I built an artist similarity graph of 100,000 of the most popular artists. I use The Echo Nest artist similarity to connect each artist to its four nearest neighbors. To find the path between any two artists I use a bidirectional Dijkstra shortest path algorithm. Most paths can be computed in less than 100ms.
Boiling The Frog Spotify
The Spotify Apps API is the perfect hacking platform. You can build a Spotify app that has full access to the vast Spotify music catalog and artwork, along with access to the listener’s catalog. Since the Spotify Apps run in an embedded browser all of your web app programming skills apply. You can use jQuery, make calls to JSON APIs, use HTML 5 canvas. It is all there. Spotify has done a really good job putting together this platform. The only downside is that, unlike the web, it is hard to actually release Spotify apps, but the Spotify team is working to make this easier. I’d love to release Boil the Frog because it is really fun to make playlists that bring you from one music style to another. It is interesting to see what musical neighborhoods you wander through on your way. For instance, I made a Kenny G to Cannibal Corpse playlist. To get there, the playlist brought me from easy listening, to movie soundtracks and then through video game soundtracks to get to the heavy metal world. Cool stuff. If you want to see a playlist between two artists let me know in the comments and I’ll create and share the playlist with you.
Apps Like Boil The Frog
I made a video of Boil the Frog in action. Check it out:
[youtube http://youtu.be/Nj6JAxm9aPE]
Boil The Frog Spotify Not Working
Update: I’ve just pushed the client code out to github: https://github.com/plamere/boilthefrog