The new feature is called Top Tracks in Your Network, and just like it sounds, it's a new daily chart of the most popular songs across the people you follow.
Spotify has had top music charts for genres and locations for quite some time, but the Top Tracks in Your Network feature is something the company is launching because it wants to help fuel music discovery through the social graph happening within Spotify.
Since launching its partnership with Facebook in 2011, Spotify has really ramped up its efforts to become a social network in and of itself. Two years ago, Spotify announced Spotify Follow as a way for users to follow friends, other users and artists.
"We believe music is an inherently social experience,"
"We believe music is an inherently social experience," says Spotify product manager Miles Lennon. The idea with Top Tracks in Your Network, he adds was to "think about the most human aspects of social music."
For that, Spotify spent a lot of time looking at how music is shared. Music sharing typically takes place with mentions in offline conversations or sharing specific songs or moments over a text or online chat.
Within Spotify itself, users can share individual tracks or albums through the platform — and that happens a lot — but they can also frictionlessly share what they are listening to with the activity stream.
Moving forward, what Spotify really wants to do is pair those two aspects together. So that users have the frictionless aspect of sharing what they are listening to, with the added context of one-off link.
And that's the real idea behind the Top Tracks in Your Network feature.
How it works
Top Tracks in Your Network is a playlist that is updated every day based on the activity of people in your network. The algorithm that determines the top tracks depend on how many people in your network play a track as well as how many times an individual in your network plays a certain track.
The idea is to be able to surface trends and important musical moments around the people you follow. The idea is that listeners can gauge more easily what the people they care about are listening to. That in turn, can help aid music discovery.
If I see that everyone in my network is listening to the new TV on the Radio album, it might be a great reminder for me to actually give it a listen. (And you should, it's great.)
Likewise, if I notice my husband is really obsessed with Waxahatchee, maybe that's an indication that I should buy him tickets the next time they are in town.
Adding social data everywhere
In addition to the Top Tracks in Your Network feature, Spotify is also rolling out the ability to for users to see who in their network (of both Facebook friends and Spotify Follow users) are listening to specific artists and albums.
This adds a sense of what Spotify calls "social proof" to the music discovery process.
If I'm looking at Beyoncé for instance, I might be emboldened to learn that my friend Ed Zitron is a fan of "I Am...Sasha Fierce." Ed, now I know what I'm getting you for Christmas.
Lennon tells me that Spotify's goal is to add this kind of social information to all parts of its service. "We want you to not be able to imagine listening to music without this kind of information," he says.
It's a gold goal and one that could really help Spotify become a destination for music listening above and beyond its vast catalog.
The music streaming landscape continues to be competitive and contentious. Although Spotify is the biggest subscription service — it has 12.5 million paid subscribers and 50 million active users — it's facing competition not just from the other streaming services but from YouTube.
Moreover, the service continues to be at the center of the debate about the changing nature of how music is being consumed and as a result, artists are compensated. Spotify might not be able to win over artists like Taylor Swift with its monetary arguments but maybe it will have a better chance if the service can achieve pure ubiquity, the same way iTunes did last decade.
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