Good points here. What we want to achieve is something akin to the 'support' act before a headline set. Where a more successful artist champions a smaller artist because they like what they are doing. With this site the goal is for artists to share fans to help grow their fan base. This version is the first step towards that. If that makes any sense :)
So it's a site for musicians. Then say so, and lean into it.
As I said before tastes are idiosyncratic so it makes no sense to have a single leaderboard. I would multi-tag each track by genre and language so users can rank by the subsets of tags that interest them. Ask musicians what other features they would value.
You are spot on, we don’t yet say enough that this is primarily an artist centred platform. We want this to be a place that artists share fans and get discovered by industry and playlisters so I think making this clear is key. Thanks for the input!
We are already collect genre data so will switch it on and have leaderboards when there is enough tracks of each genre. Just need to build up the pool of tracks and active artists first and prove the concept.
The only scalable solution is to use machine learning, as all the big players do. They're never going to be much better than Spotify. I'd be surprised if they got even close.
I suppose there might be a use case for A&R types who are on the hunt for new material, rather than casual listeners.