What is Pitchify?
Pitchify helps you find good music on Spotify (more about Spotify here).
Pitchify collects reviews from the two excellent webzines Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound on a daily basis, then checks if the reviewed albums are available on Spotify. Only albums that have received a rating of 8 or more (out of 10) will be included on Pitchify. Lots of albums are reviewed every day, and thousands of tracks added to Spotify every week. Pitchify tries to sort through the pile, throw away the Gagas and the Nickelbacks and present you with the very best that Spotify has to offer.
Albums that are not immediately available on Spotify will be added to Pitchify's queue, and presented on Pitchify when they become available.
How is the rating calculated and what are the flags for?
The rating shown on each post is an average rating based on the reviews that Pitchify has been collecting on the web. Not all albums will be reviewed by the same webzines, but the average rating should give an indication on how it has been received by the critics. A link to every review is found on the detail page of each album.
Not all albums will be available in all countries, some will be available in different versions and you may often see different release dates depending on regions. This is partly due to record companies still operating by the old model of distribution, and partly because different regions may have different regulations regarding lyrical content. Pitchify uses flags to indicate which countries an album is available in, if it's not available in all of the currently 7 supported countries.
How to best use Pitchify?
That depends on your preference. Updates are posted to Twitter and the site has an Album RSS feed which includes cover images and Spotify links. Or you can just visit the actual site now and then to check what's new.
For random listening there's now also a Random button in the toolbar on every page. Clicking this will draw a random album from Pitchify's pile.
Who made it?
That would be me, Anders, a Norwegian IT consultant and web developer currently living in London, UK. I love music and Spotify, and was about to set up a Spotify blog, but realized I wouldn't have time to update it anyway. Then got the idea that I could create an automatically updating "blog"; cue Pitchify.com. As of today I would say Pitchify is about 90% automated, and I am trying to crack the last 10 percent as well.
I hope you will find Pitchify useful, and please let me know if you spot a bug or have a suggestion that could make the site better.
You can reach me on admin@pitchify.com, or by using the contact form on www.andersaustad.com.
