Taste

You had a song on repeat for months when it had 2,000 listeners, then watched it blow up on everyone’s feed, and nobody believed you were there first. Plenty of people have a real ear for music, but streaming apps only reward following what’s already popular and leave no record of who found it early. Taste fixes that. You earn Notes by listening, and you stake them on songs and artists before they break. If a pick beats its expected growth curve, your Taste rating goes up, and it goes up most for early calls on obscure artists. Notes can’t buy Taste, so the leaderboard timestamps who calls songs early, has great taste, and is right, not who has the most money.

(This idea also came to me when I was losing a ton of money securities trading and realized if Spotify was a stock market I'd be rich)