Spotify's New Feature Shows You Which Artists You Listened to Before They Blew Up

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Music discovery is pretty neat, especially when the effort looking for “the next big thing” pays off. That moment in which you get to gloat about how you were there first is a pretty sweet one, even if it’s super annoying, too. No one wants to be THAT person, but it’s kind of hard not to be that asshole that wants everyone to know they knew about an artist long before they’ve blown up just so you can point fingers at your friends and say, “I was right.”

Well, Spotify has made it considerably easier to be that asshole now with their latest feature, Found Them First. Via this website, you can sign in with your Spotify account details and find out which artists you “discovered” long (or shortly, in some cases) before they achieved mainstream success. The way it works is by measuring what percentage you fall under, with the first 1-15% being the “early listeners” in this case.

The artists are only deemed big and included if they’ve accumulated over 20 million streams with a 2000% growth rate, though, so don’t expect anything too obscure to show up in your results. So if you’d like to find out whether you’re on the cutting edge or not, you can do so here. Fortunately, if you haven’t “discovered” any artists, Spotify will make you a playlist of artists that they’ll recommend so that you can “discover” some artists before they achieve further success.

If you’re really in the know, then this feature won’t do too much for you. Spotify doesn’t posses the library for such a feature in the same was as Bandcamp or SoundCloud, but it’s a nice idea even if it is for superstars only at the moment (Some of the artists that Spotify recommended I find first were Panda Bear, Vic Mensa, and Young Fathers). Still, it’s a step in the right direction for automated music discovery.