Is simply enjoying music not enough for you? Do you need to make sure that the music you enjoy is not being enjoyed by anyone else? Do you have a compulsive need to suck the fun out of music and only listen to super-obscure acts and ditch them once they achieve any degree of mainstream popularity?
If any of this accurately describes you, you may just be a music snob. Well, there’s good news if you are, because Spotify have just launched their latest tool in their crusade to enable music snobs of all stripes. It’s called the ‘Found Them First’ tool and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
As The Verge reports, Found Them First allows users to find which artists they were listening to before the rest of the world caught on. In other words, it will remind you that you were listening to FKA twigs before everyone had downloaded ‘Two Weeks’ onto their iPhone.
The page scans a Spotify users’ listening history and tells them if they were an “early listener” for a breakout artist, defining such acts as those who’ve accumulated more than 20 million total streams as well as a growth rate of at least 2,000 percent between January 2013 and June this year.
While it’s not clear just which artists have made the grade, promo images feature snaps of FKA twigs and Lorde. Meanwhile, Spotify say only the “top 1-15 percent of listeners are considered ‘early listeners’ and will be able to see this ranking”.
If you don’t happen to belong to this Illuminati tier of Spotify users, there’s a consolation playlist of artists who may end up being the next big thing to keep an eye on and help us “get ahead of the pack”. Gee, thanks.
