The chart, which changes daily, tracks how many times a song has been played by people in your Spotify network. It also includes a drop down list next to each song that details every one of your friends that listened to the song. Spotify Premium users will be able to listen to each individual song on the chart from their phone while non-subscribers will only be able to shuffle through the chart.
The desktop version of Spotify does not have the Top Tracks in Your Network chart yet, but does let users to see which of their Facebook and Spotify Follow friends listened to a certain album or artist they clicked on. Spotify plans to roll out the Top Tracks In Your Network feature to desktops soon.
Spotify’s social ecosystem has grown into a huge driver of streams for the company. Charlie Hellman, vice president of product at Spotify revealed to Business Insider “one out of every five Spotify streams comes from a user listening to another user’s music.” Ed Sheeran can apparently attribute 86 million of his X album’s year best 430 million streams to the power of sharing.
The new chart is another piece in Spotify’s plan. Last March, the streaming service allowed users to follow other Spotify users and receive a real-time feed of their activity. Spotify product manager Miles Lennon explained the decision Business Insider by saying that “music is inherently social we think that what your friends are listening to could be a really, really compelling path to [music] discovery.”
Spotify’s venture into becoming an immersive social experience has been complicated. Last month, discontinued its App Finder feature which allowed users to access a library of apps customized for Spotify.
One of Spotify’s earliest app entry’s into social listening was Soundrop, an app that lets users listen to music in a chat room while discussing with one another and voting for which song to be played next. Soundrop was a novel idea that never realized its potential as a social hub of music for Spotify’s 20 million+ active users. At the time of the App Finder’s removal, Soundrop informed TechCrunch they had an average of 120,000 monthly unique visitors, less than 2 percent of Spotify’s 8.5 million unique visitors in the United States.
With YouTube’s Music Key coming soon and Beats Music potentially arriving on Apple’s 800 million iOS devices, Spotify and its 50 million monthly active users will soon have to learn how to socialize in a more competitive marketplace.
