Test Drive: If you liked them before they sold out, you’ll like Spotify’s Found Them First

Spotify has a new feature catering to those listeners who are ahead of the trends. It’s called Found Them First, and the tool scours your listening history to see if you were streaming any artists before they hit the big time. The streaming platform defined breakout artists as act that have surpassed 20 million total streams with a growth rate of at least 2,000% between January 2013 and June 2015.

Normally when Spotify releases one of these fun new data toys, I spend some time fiddling with the different parameters and settings, exploring new ways of looking at my listening tastes. Not so much here. After I logged in, the tool promptly informed me that I hadn’t discovered any breakout artists. It provided me with a playlist of up-and-coming artists so that I could hop on the bandwagon of the next big star before anyone else, but that was it. No dropdown menus or sliders or tick boxes to play with.

RAIN’s Managing Editor Brad Hill is hipper than I, and was more successful with Found Them First. He was credited with helping two artists to popularity. And while he said that he did enjoy the resulting playlist, he’s still more a fan of Spotify’s Discovery Weekly service for finding new tunes.

Apparently only the top 1% to 15% of listeners will get ranked as discoverers, meaning there’s a pretty narrow slice of Spotify’s millions of listeners who will get anything out of this feature. So if you want to measure your tastemaker prowess, then have a gander at Found Them First. If you don’t care, then just keep listening to your own favorite jams and keep an eye on your Discovery Weekly list when you want something new.