About

Before They Were Basic scores each of your Spotify liked songs by its real-world popularity: 0 means obscure (almost nobody listens), 100 means a household name. As of February 2026 Spotify no longer exposes popularity to most apps, so we use Last.fm's global listener counts for each track's artist (log-scaled to 0–100). "I knew them before they were big" is, after all, about the artist.

We also compute, and log for analytics, a few personal signals — how recently you saved a song, and how often you've liked a given artist or album — but those no longer affect the tier; popularity does.

Songs are sorted by popularity into ten tiers from I Knew Them Before They Were Big (least popular) to Basic Bitch (most popular), which you can save as Spotify playlists or render as a music-taste iceberg.

This is a rewrite of an open-source project, hardened for production and instrumented with full telemetry that streams to Splunk. Not affiliated with Spotify.