Spotify launched Spotify Top Tracks on Tuesday in an effort to bring new users on board the music streaming service as it continues to compete with rivals such as Pandora and Rdio, as well as detract attention from Google with its own recently launched music streaming offering.
Its new weekly chart listings focus on the top 50 streamed and shared songs within the Spotify platform, with information on track play counts also given. The play counts currently only show for those tracks that have made the top 50, though this data will soon be provided for all tracks on the service.
Called the Spotify 50 and Social 50, the charts can be configured by region and embedded in a website in the form of a widget, serving to increase Spotify’s presence across the Web. The charts have a drop down list of countries should you wish to find out what’s musically hot in other parts of the world, and you can also pull up chart listings for the previous four weeks.
Steve Savoca, Spotify’s head of content, commented on the new feature, saying, “What‘s so powerful about the streaming charts is they let you hear what people are really listening to, right now, and not just what they’re buying.”
He added, “We want to be the best artist promotional platform in the world, and showing play counts is a clear step in that direction. Now artists can get immediate feedback from their fans on how their music is performing on Spotify.”
The Sweden-based music streaming service launched in Europe in 2008 before arriving in the US in 2011. Its global user base, spread across 28 countries, is currently around the 24 million mark, with six million forking out for a subscription. Major rival Pandora, meanwhile, has somewhere in the region of 70 million active users, with the majority of its revenue generated through advertising.
