Spotify has started publishing this week charts of the 50 most-streamed and 50 most-shared songs on the music-streaming network, providing valuable information on online music listeners.
There are two Spotify charts: the Spotify 50 ranks tracks by number of plays in a single week while the Social 50 ranks those that have been shared the most on social networks.
These charts will be updated every Monday at 4pm GMT and are available via a widget that can be embedded on other websites. Users can click any track from the charts to open it up in a web-based Spotify player along with other related tracks.
Of course, this is an attempt by Spotify to attract more users to its network of 24m active members worldwide. More importantly, it would like to grow the number of paid subscribers, which currently stands at 6m.
However, the charts also provide useful data on the listening habits of music-streaming users, giving an indication of the number of streams happening on Spotify on a weekly basis.
Selecting Ireland from the chart’s drop-down menu tells us that Daft Punk’s Get Lucky is most popular among Irish users this week with more than 50,000 plays, followed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Ray Dalton with 34,000 plays for Can’t Hold Us.
The Social 50, which will of course be more influenced by current trends, reveals Eurovision topping the chart, with Denmark’s winning Only Teardrops by Emmelie de Forest at the top, followed by Ireland’s entry from Ryan Dolan, Only Love Survives. (You may have come last in the song contest, Ryan, but you’re No 2 in the Spotify Social 50.)
Users can scan through previous weeks of the charts, which at the moment stretches back to the week ending 28 April 2013.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Spotify will also begin releasing figures on the total number of plays tracks have received worldwide since October 2008, which would be valuable information for artists.
