#BlackGirlMagic celebrates the power, resilience and beauty inspired by black women in our generation and generations past. As part of Black History Month, Spotify and Instagram have teamed up to spotlight #BlackGirlMagic with an interactive U.S. map highlighting the most-liked Instagram posts featuring the artists from #BlackGirlMagic playlists who are most associated with each state, according […]
The Most Christmassy Songs & Countries on Spotify
You might have heard holiday music on the radio or in stores last month, and thought, “hmmmm, that’s a bit early.” In fact, Spotify data shows that most listeners weren’t ready for it that soon. As you can see from the data visualization below, which shows Christmas listening by country and day this year, when […]
Dataviz: A ‘Joy Plot’ about Joy Division
You’ve likely seen the iconic album art from Joy Division’s 1979 album, Unknown Pleasures on T-shirts, tattoos, and online. You might also know that the image represents a data plot of eighty successive radio pulses from the first known pulsar, reproduced from a diagram appearing in the January 1971 issue of Scientific American magazine by […]
Listening Diversity Increases Nearly 40 Percent on Spotify
Any data provided herein is from Spotify’s internal sources. The music industry is growing after years of decline, with the increase attributed to streaming. So if this is how people listen to music now, what does that mean for artists? Will they have an easier time finding an audience, or will streaming focus global attention […]
Data Reveals Podcasts Are Workday-Friendly
You know the routine: get to your desk, put on some music, and start working, right? Not necessarily. It turns out that podcasts, sometimes more associated with commuting, peak more during the workday than music does. Many tasks (for example writing, or other tasks involving words), call for music that helps you focus. But this […]
Genres in the Key of Life: Different Music Uses Different Scales
Our first foray into key signatures found G and C major to be the most popular musical keys on Spotify, probably because the former is easiest to play on a guitar, the latter on piano. Now, let’s look at how key signatures vary between genre. Detecting key signature through audio analysis Trained musicians practice the […]
How Reggaeton Became a Global Phenomenon on Spotify
Latin music, in particular the reggaeton genre, with its addictive, start-stop beat (sample below), has expanded far beyond its places of origin to become a global genre that regularly tops the charts. Throughout the summer Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito – Remix,” featuring none other than Justin Bieber singing in Spanish, followed by J […]
Data Viz: ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ Follows the Eclipse
During the recent eclipse, listening to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” exploded 3,521 percent on Spotify in the United States (1,017 percent globally) as the moon’s shadow began to cross the country. The song also spiked 75 percent on March 10, 2016, the day after another total eclipse. This time, we saw a […]
How Students Listen 2017
College is about learning, learning how to learn, and expanding horizons before they narrow into careers and other trappings of post-student life. Universities are also places where people form musical identities, due not only to the relatively inadvanced age of the student listener (music taste solidifies with age). It’s also because they’re living with each other, all the time, for years, in […]
An Adventure Through Chrome’s Wildly-Varying Emoji Support 🤷🏻
…and how I came to appreciate the challenges of working with emoji Back on March 9, while skimming Hacker News during my inter–job vacation, I read the piece “💩”.length === 2, and thought, huh, that is so interesting. Emoji are way more complicated than I thought. It seems challenging to work with them, but also, not […]
Iconic Playlists: What Emoji Say About Music
Did you know Spotify users have made over 35 million playlists with emoji in their titles? Which artists get the most emoji? Which ones do they get? And what could the dog emoji have to do with reggaeton? Emoji, those cute, simple images that convey thoughts on chats and social media, arguably represent the most […]
NCAA March Madness: The Musical Version
Tonight, the sixteen college basketball teams who’ve made it into the Sweet Sixteen round of the 2017 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship will face off to see who makes it into the next round, with a chance to win the whole thing. What if, instead of games of basketball, the “March Madness” tournament were decided by which schools […]
Animated Heat Map: Prince Listening Around the World
In celebration of Prince’s return to streaming, here is a map of Prince listening over time. Which city listened to the most Prince? That would be his hometown of Minneapolis; see the top 20 Prince-listening cities by share of listening below the map. These cities had the highest share of Prince listening: Minneapolis, Minnesota, […]
Spotify, Accuweather Reveal How Weather Affects Music Listening
When it rains, we put on a raincoat or get under an umbrella, because we can’t control the weather. We can, however, control what we hear while it’s raining, especially with services that let you play whatever you want. We wondered: Do people make different music-listening decisions based on weather? This simple question led to […]
National Geographic’s Best Winter Trips of 2017
Looking for some winter travel options? National Geographic recently launched its Best Winter Trips 2017, with a range of options around the world, listed below. To help prospective travelers get a feel for the places on the list, Spotify curated a playlist for each destination, and then we put them on a map, so you can […]
