Free Spotify Play For Top 50 Charts

Spotify is launching its own charts called the Spotify 50 and Social 50, listing the most-streamed and most-shared songs across its entire library. The charts can be easily embedded in websites, and contain links to stream the music they contain. They can also switch between Spotify’s 28 regions on the fly and display data from past weeks, with the numbers updating each Monday around noon EST.

Following in the footsteps of Billboard, Spotify is now publishing a top-50 list of the most streamed and most shared tunes through the service. The lists are being made available as widgets for website owners to embed on their site. Fans can listen to the top tracks free of charge without having to sign up or register for Spotify.

Spotify is no doubt hoping the move will help bring in additional members at a time when the streaming music scene is really heating up. At present, Spotify has 24 million active members although only six million are paid subscribers. For comparison, Internet radio outlet Pandora has more than 200 million registered users and 60 million active members.

The company is also planning to release play-count data, which is the total number of plays per track. This global data will date back to October 2008 and should give artists a clear picture of how well their music is doing through the service.

On top of the new charts, Spotify thinks the data could prove valuable in a different way: surfacing new talent. Its head of US operations Ken Parks said that information about listening habits and social media shares has pointed the company toward some interesting artists that it hopes to “break” in the near future. Spotify has been rumored to be interested in actually producing its own content — rumors that CEO Daniel Ek recently denied — but even without taking that step, it can still add a lot of extra value to its service just by getting smarter about the kinds of music it presents to its 24 million users. “Data is our secret sauce,” said Parks.

Earlier this month the Recording Industry Association of America expanded their gold and platinum certification programs to include music streamed over the Internet and as mentioned in the intro, Billboard is now also charting streaming music for the first time.

Try it: