My friends are posting summaries of their Spotify listening habits over the last year and I want to share mine too. Where do I find it?
If you’re a frequent listener, Spotify has a lot of data about your listening habits with music. From when you listen to total amount of time you’ve spent listening to what tracks, artists, and genres, there’s a lot of data in the Spotify system about every user. Of course, every other streaming music service – and streaming video service! – has this type of data too, but Spotify decided this year to share all of it with us users in a way that we can easily share with our friends and family.
The confusion comes from the fact that it’s actually not part of the Spotify app but a Web page that needs to gain access to your Spotify account so it can analyze the data and produce the stats. Not to worry, though, it’s pretty easy to work with, as I’ll show in this tutorial article. Note that I haven’t tried doing this on a mobile device, just from my computer, but I expect the process will be substantially the same.
Here’s my regular Spotify home page:
Looks good, and if you look closely you can see I’m listening to the Ramin Djawadi soundtrack from the splendid HBO TV series Westworld. Uhm, sorry, sidetracked for a second!
Scroll down a bit below the Evening vibes and you’ll find this set of choices:
It’s subtle, but on the lower left there’s a new one slipped in that’s called 2017 Wrapped. That’s what you want, so don’t be sidetracked by your Latin Country Workout music… A click and:
You might think that you want to choose “Your Top Songs 2017” on the left but scroll down further until you see the nice big banner “Look Back at 2017”. Like this:
Curious about the most popular music, artists or artists by gender? They’re all a click away. Stay focused, though, and click on the link “Look Back at 2017”.
You’ll be moved to your Web browser and will need to approve the program gaining access to your Spotify data. Once you do, some basic stats are shown:
You can get some fun data out of this too if you want to do some basic math. For example, on average, I listened to songs that were a whopping 7.8 minutes long. Soundtracks, my standard listening, are not structured the same as pop songs, that’s for sure! It also suggests that I listened to an average of 11.2 songs per artist, roughly one album per artist.
Of course, that’s not exactly right because some musicians made my list far more often than others. You can find out by scrolling down, down, down past the somewhat banal resolutions for 2018 and everything, down to this info:
The fact that all of my top five songs are from Hans Zimmer doesn’t actually show that I’m obsessed with the prolific composer, however, but rather points to the fact that the Spotify shuffle algorithm is horrible; I have a 6000+ track playlist but it keeps biasing towards one particular soundtrack for no obvious reason. Super frustrating, but that’s another story…
Anyway, now you know. So how’d you do? Leave some stats in the comments below and let’s see if anyone broke 100,000 minutes last year!
Note: 100,000 minutes in a year translates to only 4.5 hours/day of listening.