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 […]
Inside Music
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The ‘Monster Mash’ Is The Most Seasonal Song on Spotify
Spotify contains no fewer than 326 recordings of “The Monster Mash,” by everyone from The Beach Boys to the London Theatre Orchestra & Cast. But the undisputed master of ‘The Mash’ is of course Bobby “Boris” Pickett, pictured to the right, who unleashed this ghoulish delight on the world in August of 1962. People snapped […]
10 Data Art Projects by Spotify Analysts & Designers
We at Spotify love music. We love data, too. Because our data is about music and how over 100 million real people listen to it, it’s actually quite human. As our own Matt Ogle said of the popular Discover Weekly feature, “Man vs. machine is no longer a useful distinction in terms of how we […]
The Most Streamed Music from Spotify Discover Weekly
For Monday morning motivation, music ranks just behind coffee as people’s favorite boost, according to an Ipsos survey of over three thousand people in Australia, Brazil, France, Sweden, and the United States. While 44 percent understandably choose the top wake-up method, coffee, a full 42 percent choose music to get their day going — more […]
The Beatles’ First 100 Days on Spotify
The Beatles appeared on Spotify on Christmas Eve, much to the delight of everyone from hardcore Beatles fans to casual listeners. Today, we can reveal how music fans have been listening to The Fab Four over their first 100 days on Spotify. We’ve laid out the stats in text below, but also check out the […]
Data Viz: How The Super Bowl States Listen
On Sunday, two titans of football will clash in San Francisco: the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos. These competitors are separated by 1,357 miles as the crow flies; one sits in the mountains of the west, the other on the eastern seaboard. They’re different, and so it’s no surprise that they have different favorites […]
FiveThirtyEight Explores ‘The Drake Effect’
Take a look at any list of really popular music, and you’ll probably see some songs “featuring” one artist or another. The featured artist phenomenon is real — and increasingly common, as artists cross-pollenating their talents and fan bases by appearing on each other’s tracks. Drake is featured on so many artists’ tracks, and to such well-deserved acclaim, that […]
Trending Playlist Words for 2015: Jams, Spotify + Chill, Tropical House, and More
Languages evolve. Otherwise, the middle English in Chaucer would be as easy to read as your Facebook feed. Spotify listeners have created over 2 billion playlists. Those playlists have titles. By looking at the words in those titles in anonymous aggregate, we can find subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes in how people use language to describe […]
Data Reveals The Most-Covered Christmas Songs
Each year brings another round of Christmas music, as artists and fans celebrate this distinctly musical holiday with yet more Christmas music to enjoy. This year finds Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé vying for the top spot, with “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (a Carey original) and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” (Bublé’s cover of the […]
Weird Al’s 10 Greatest Calls of All Time
Today is the birthday of “Weird Al” Yankovic, who cuts a unique figure on the music landscape. Nobody else has recorded so many song parodies, for so many years, with so much appreciation from the public. He’s the undisputed king of the genre. To a great extent, Weird Al’s success with each parody depends on […]
