Legalize It! Hear Bittorrent’s Top Tracks On Spotify

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

When I first met Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, in a fancy New York restaurant in 2009, his vision for the company was clear: By offering free music with an upgrade path to a paid subscription, Spotify would lure music freeloaders away from bit torrent and other file-sharing resources, and back to acquiring music in a non-infringing way. His plan appears to be working.

(In fact, Ek knew bit torrent quite well. Before launching Spotify, he was the CEO of µTorrent, a popular bit torrent file sharing client.)

As such, the Spotify chief would probably appreciate Legalize It!, a clever music app that indexes the most-shared albums on bit torrent. Instead of encouraging people to download the songs there, it plays them in Spotify. (The app uses some sort of “python wrapper” from The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm.)

As of today, here’s the list:

no°1: Take Care by Drake with 36532 unique peers today.
no°2: 21 by Adele with 20612 unique peers today.
no°3: Overexposed by Maroon 5 with 20305 unique peers today.
no°4: Talk That Talk by Rihanna with 19740 unique peers today.
no°8: Watch The Throne by Jay Z with 15676 unique peers today.
no°14: Making Mirrors by Gotye with 12858 unique peers today.
no°15: Looking 4 Myself (Deluxe Version) by Usher with 12054 unique peers today.
no°20: Torches by Foster The People with 10827 unique peers today.
no°21: Sorry For Party Rocking by LMFAO with 10787 unique peers today.
no°28: + by Ed Sheeran with 10260 unique peers today.

Legalize It! was created at Music Hack Day Barcelona by Ben Fields. If, like him, you are some sort of wizard, you can download the source code here.