Spotify launches app to find out which artists users helped to discover

Log in to Found Them First and it will crunch your data to show you the artists for whom you were, for instance, among the first 8% of listeners of.

For the record, Spotify is classing “breakout artists” as anyone with 20 million cumulative song streams, as well as a growth rate of 2000% between January 2013 and June 2015. “This experience is an ode to the fans who truly love discovering new artists”, said VP of Creative and Brand Strategy JACKIE JANTOS. Meanwhile, getting in “early” means being among the first 1% to 15% of listeners to those artists on the service. But with digital streaming comes cold, hard evidence of when you first listened to a band – and Spotify now lets you use it to work out if your bragging is accurate.

So while you might have earned bragging rights for discovering a band before the rest of us, you probably weren’t entirely instrumental in helping them “make it”. My results showed I had supposedly “discovered” nine artists and presented the interesting factoid that I’d listened to Sam Smith before 98 percent of other Spotify users. It maybe played randomly through Spotify Radio, or perhaps someone at your party played it. It turns out that Spotify did actually think about this.

A label that’s just signed “the new Royal Blood” or “the new Chvrches” might love the chance to get their music in front of the earliest streamers of those original artists, but doing it without annoying those fans will need to be handled carefully.