Soundrop Introduces Charts Based On Listener Likes
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Soundrop, which builds group listening rooms that can exist all over the internet at the same time, offers plenty of rooms where you can hear someone’s idea of good music. Now, it’s harvesting charts of the most-starred music from all of its rooms in Spotify, and filtering them into genre charts designed to offer the discriminating music fan another way to find out about stuff.
For the uninitiated, Soundrop is a Spotify and web app, but it’s also an iPhone app, meaning that you can carry around rooms full of people and music in your pocket (as with Turntable.fm).
So stop complaining.
To build these brand new genre charts, which promise the best of everything from Ambient to Death Metal, Soundrop will keep a running tally of starred tracks from its Spotify listening rooms.
If you like to follow a particular genre, you can subscribe to that playlist in your Spotify giving you a constantly-updated list of what people are into in that particular genre that automatically goes onto your phone if you pay for Spotify — or, you can cherry-pick favorites to keep in your Spotify collection, whether you pay for it or not.
“Today, everyone can benefit from the collected wisdom of millions of music fans,” said Soundrop CEO Inge Andre Sandvik [2011 interview] in a statement. “By subscribing to one of our new playlists, you can have the best music for each genre right at your fingertips. And it’s updated every day, so you never miss a new discovery.”
So, who are these people making these decisions on your behalf? How many of them are there?
According to the statement, the most popular rooms in Soundrop “routinely” have more than a thousand people in them at any given time.
Evolver.fm asked Soundrop evangelist Cortney Harding for some more numbers. She responded that the two most popular rooms — Chill Out and Dubstep — have about three million visits, while Indie Wok has about 1.8 million.
“Beyond alerting listeners to the most beloved tracks in a genre, these new ‘best-of’ playlists provide meaningful insight for the music industry,” according to the statement. “Music discovery has changed in recent years, and it’s not a stretch to imagine and band rising up the genre chart and capturing a bigger share of an audience or even a label deal. These are truly crowd-sourced playlists.”
To check them out, go to Soundrop’s public Spotify profile.
And here are some direct links to the three most popular charts: Chill Out | Dubstep | Indie Wok (all require desktop Spotify).
