It was the twenty-something-th time that I found myself at another not-so-sold-out show for my favorite band at a tiny club in SF. After the set, the lead singer, Eric Frederic, who I admired like a god but who had probably got to know me as the kid too young to be at his show, handed me a burned CD with the word “Wallpaper.” sharpied onto it.

That was 2006. Since then, Eric Frederick, known today as Ricky Reed, has taken Wallpaper. to impressive heights and produced Jason Derulo’s two recent top-5 mega hits “Wiggle” and “Talk Dirty To Me.” This guy is going to be a super star if he isn’t one already.

I like to tell this story, admittedly, because I feel like a genius for recognizing Eric’s musical talent before the rest of the world did, especially my friend Nick. Indeed, we all have told this story:

“I liked them before they got big!”

But alas, we don’t have the data to back it up. But Spotify, you do…

As one of the most popular music streaming services in the world with over 40 million active users spending hours a day on your platform, you generate massive amounts of data. Listens, likes, follows and favorites for all users are collected, categorized, time stamped, and then — as far as the I can tell — locked away forever. You have flirted with giving us users a taste of our data, but still favor using it to feed your increasingly expensive recommendation engine that still thinks Skrillex would be just perfect on my Michael Buble radio station — a collaboration between the two would be cool though!

Why, Spotify? All we want is to better understand how we listen to music and maybe prove to a certain friend of ours that we really did find Wallpaper. before he did — screw you Nick.

You should want it too. It could really help your business.

A 2013 study found that “music subscription services are all losing money, and that is going to remain the case until they find a way to monetize a worldwide user base.” $10 a month for Spotify Premium membership from a mere 20% of your total users isn’t going to cut it anymore, especially when competition is stiff from the likes of iTunes and Pandora. The study also suggests that “sustainability of an ad-supported revenue model is a big question mark.”

Maybe I’m oversimplifying by saying that your monetization woes can be resolved if you build data visualizations into your platform… but they can. At least a little.

Let me explain.

Introducing Spotify Analytics, For Everyone

There are two ways I think you can add visualization to your platform. The first is simply adding a stats button to every user and artist’s profile, showing relevant visualizations. Don’t give this away for free. Bundle it with Premium and incentivize the crap out of users to want it (more on that later).