Spotify weekly listening stats

Photo Credit: Spotify

In a move to provide more visibility into users’ listening habits, Spotify launches weekly “Listening Stats” to show users what they’ve been listening to.

Spotify users are accustomed to waiting until the end of the year for their personalized Wrapped year-in-review stats. The only other way to get insights into your Spotify listening habits was to link your account to third-party services like Last.fm. But now, Spotify aims to change that with a new feature called Listening Stats that will show users weekly numbers about their listening habits.

Listening Stats will show you your top artists and top songs for a given week, and enable you to share those numbers with others via Instagram or WhatsApp—or with friends directly on Spotify through the platform’s new messaging feature. The weekly highlights will also include special moments such as milestones and new discoveries, Spotify says.

Users can also create a playlist based on the songs they already listen to, and what they might want to listen to next based on their listening habits.

Listening Stats is currently rolling out to free and premium users in over 60 countries. To access the feature, tap on your profile image and select the “Listening Stats” tab. From there, you can check out what you’ve been listening to and share those stats if desired.

Spotify clarified that it will still release its annual recaps via the highly anticipated Wrapped. The new listening stats just provide a better snapshot of what you’ve been listening to in a given week. That said, it might remove the element of surprise by the time your Wrapped stats roll out. But perhaps that’s intentional, as Spotify’s subscriptions appear to be flatlining in the United States. Showing users weekly listening stats could be a retention measure to keep subscribers who won’t want to lose the feature—Apple Music only offers a monthly recap at best.

It’s a well-timed launch, as Spotify remains the subject of much scrutiny surrounding transparency and its overall business practices.

Naturally, Listening Stats only shows you the content you’ve actually listened to—there’s still no sure-fire way to know if a song you’re listening to was recommended to you organically, or whether it was promoted by Spotify. That’s the topic of a new class action lawsuit filed against the company this week, which asserts that Spotify’s recommendation tools are little more than a payola scheme that isn’t properly disclosed to consumers.