Spotify launches Found Them First to show you which artists you listened to before they made it big

Spotify already lets you listen to more than 20 million songs from around the world, from indie and pop to reggae and beyond. Now the music-streaming company wants to show you breakout artists you were instrumental in finding before they hit the big time.

Found Them First dives into your listening history to surface new artists you helped “discover.”

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You have to connect your Spotify account to the web app, which scans your records to reveal how much of a cutting-edge music fan you are. Turns out, there’s only one artist in my history where I was in the first one percent of listeners — and I can’t even remember listening to it.

The new app shows you tracks where you were in the first 1-15 percent of listeners, and it defines a “breakout” artist as having 20 million streams, and a growth rate of 2,000 percent between January 2013 and June 2015.

“This experience is an ode to the fans who truly love discovering new artists,” said Jackie Jantos, Spotify’s VP of creative and brand strategy. “Users are rewarded for listening early on, and earn some bragging rights.”

It’s a fun little experiment for sure, and it even lets you share a playlist of all the tracks you were “first on the scene” to, as well as tracks from other related “breakout” artists. This all feeds into Spotify’s big push to help you discover fresh music, and comes just a few months after it introduced a weekly playlist of recommended music based on your listening habits.

However, just because you listened to a track early on, this surely doesn’t mean you actually liked it? 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. “Early listener” is defined as someone who has streamed an artist at least five times in a month. So although Spotify Radio data is included, the random nature of the service means it would be highly unlikely that the same song would play five times in a single month.