Spotify made an announcement today that is big news for musicians and singers. Recode reports that the music streaming service now offers a free feature called Fan Insights for artists and their managers.
In the Fan Insights dashboard, artists have access to a whole slew of data. They can check how many monthly listens and fans they have. They can also access information about the locations, demographics, and music preferences of the fans listening to their music.
It seems that Spotify's point with this cornucopia of data is that they want to help littler musicians and bands be strategic about their career moves. A manager with access to Fan Insights could plan a band's tour around locations with the most fans, or keep track of how a single is received.
And all of it is free. Right now musicians have to request access to Fan Insights, but soon it will be open to everyone. Spotify wants to bring in more and more musicians and this new feature would probably be very appealing to groups that aren't already huge names. YouTube and SoundCloud have always provided location data to their users, but that's about it.
In their announcement, Spotify also released some usage numbers. Now they're at 75 million users on Spotify, and 1.7 billion hours of music streamed each month. It makes sense that a musician would want to know what all those users are doing in detail.