- Spotify Listening Habits Apps Free
- Spotify Free Music App
- Spotify Listening Time
- Spotify Listening Tracker
- Spotify Listening Habits Apps For Beginners
Spotify announced its Q1 2020 financial and user metrics today. While the company’s quarterly numbers looked healthy, for the most part, listening habits have evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, games console and connected device consumption is up and morning listening routines have transformed as millions of people hunker down behind closed doors. As Spotify put it, “every day now looks like the weekend.”
The company revealed that it grew its total monthly active users (MAUs) to 286 million — up 31% and 5% on the previous year and quarter, respectively. Paid premium subscribers hit 130 million, a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 31% and quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) increase of 5%, meaning the company has maintained its roughly 45% ratio of paid to ad-supported users.
For Spotify users during the global pandemic, listening habits on the streaming service have turned away from podcasts while searches are up for more “chill” or instrumental music, the company. Spotify announced its Q1 2020 financial and user metrics today. While the company’s quarterly numbers looked healthy, for the most part, listening habits have evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. Spotify already offers plenty of personalized playlists based on your listening habits in its “Made For You” section, but the advantage of Soundtrack Your Workout is that you can customize it. The home screen of the Spotify app is a prime example of how algorithms govern a listening experience. Its goal is to quickly help users find something they are going to enjoy listening to. One of the most popular music and podcast streaming services in the world, Spotify has today launched a new kind of playlist called ‘Your Daily Podcast Playlist’ where the app will suggest podcasts that it thinks a user might like listening to. Spotify users love seeing the stats the streaming service offers about their music listening habits and now you can find out how alternative they think your music taste is. An online tool called.
In terms of financials, Spotify reported revenue of €1.85 billion ($2 billion), up 22% from last year but static compared to the previous quarter. The company returned an operating loss of €17 million ($18 million), compared to losses of €47 million ($51 million) last year and €77 million ($84 million) for Q4 2019.
The pandemic effect
In some of its markets worst hit by the pandemic, including Italy and Spain, Spotify said overall daily active users and consumption declined — however, the company said listening habits have started to bounce back, while “consumption has meaningfully recovered” in many markets.
Moreover, where consumption was declining, it might seem reasonable to assume MAUs and paid subscribers would decline too, but the opposite was true. “Both new and reactivated MAUs grew substantially, even during lockdown periods in major markets,” the company wrote in its earnings report.
While there were no major surprises in Spotify’s Q1 2020 financials, with users and subscribers sitting roughly in line with forecasts, digging down into the numbers reveals some interesting trends. For example, listening via wearables, cars, and web-based platforms dropped by “double digits” in some cases, while consumption through TV and games consoles grew by more than 50% over the same period. For ad-supported “free” users in the U.S. specifically, Spotify said games consoles represented a “top 2 or 3” platform for consumption for the past month. More generally, connected device usage grew by more than 40% among ad-supported users in all Spotify markets.
This is what Spotify means when it says “every day now looks like the weekend”: Instead of commuting to work, people are sitting at home in their bedrooms and living rooms due to lockdown. Spotify said this trend was more pronounced in podcasts than music, which the company attributes to “car and commute” habits that have changed significantly over the past two months. The company said that 19% of its monthly users now “engage with podcast content,” up from 16% in the previous quarter. Separately, Spotify said it has seen a spike in podcast consumption related to meditation and well-being, while searches for relaxing music — covering “chill” and “instrumental” — have also increased.
Elsewhere in the digital media realm, Netflix more than doubled its own Q1 2020 subscriber expectations, gaining 15.8 million new paying customers compared to the 7 million it had projected.
Do you know which artist you listen to the most? Do you know when you last listened to an artist? What happens when your kids take over your Spotify account?
Your music listening history contains all sorts of great information. I analyze my music data to discover new insights, find the “lost” bands I stopped listening to a while ago, and much much more. In this post, I’ll help you start uncovering insights in your very own listening data! I’ll even share some questions you can ask to kickstart your analysis.
How to get your personal listening data
Spotify Listening Habits Apps Free
First thing’s first: you need to get some data. The best way to collect long-term data is to use Last.fm. For a shorter-term data set, you can get three months of listening history from Spotify.
Scrobbling with Last.fm
Last.fm is a music service that lets you track your music with what they call “scrobbling.” Here’s how you can turn scrobbling into data:
- Create a Last.fm account (it’s free!).
- Enable scrobbling so that Last.fm can track all your listening across your digital music services.
- Once Last.fm has a few weeks of listening data, use my friend Ben’s LastFmToCSV converter—simply pop in your username and it’ll create a CSV for you.
I’ve been scrobbling data with Last.fm since 2007. Don’t be disheartened if you are only just starting—even a single month of music data can be interesting. And if you start now, you’ll have a year of data to look at before you know it!
Requesting your Spotify listening data
Don’t want to wait for scrobbling to capture your listening data? If you have a Spotify account, you can request three months of data directly from Spotify! Just follow these steps:
- If you don’t have a Spotify account yet, create one here (it’s free!).
- Once logged into Spotify, head to the privacy page where there is an option to download your data.
- Wait a few days for Spotify to send you an email with your data.
Although this is an easier method, you only get a three-month snapshot of data. But there’s still plenty in there to get some great insights into your recent listening habits.
Finding stories in your listening data
Now that you’ve got data, you’re all set to explore your listening habits! The following are questions that guided my analysis, as well as the stories I uncovered. Download this Tableau Public workbook to see the calculations behind each viz, or click on each viz to learn more about it. You can also favorite the workbook to keep it handy as a resource.
Which tracks and artists do you listen to most?
This is probably the first question you’re going to ask. For me, the question revealed a tad embarrassing answer. For 10 years of listening data, 7 of my top 10 tracks are from the movie Frozen. I’d like to blame my kids for that, but I’ll let you judge for yourself who chose to play those tracks back in 2013.
When do you listen to new music?
As I get older, do I listen to more or less new music? My hunch tells me that as time goes on, I’d settle into my old favorites and shy away from new artists. But the proportion of new music I’ve listened to each year changed from 44% to 37% between 2016 and 2018—looks like I might be settling into things I know.
What artists do you binge listen to?
The viz below shows my listening streaks. Each trail that rises from the x-axis is a listening streak. The higher it gets, the more consecutive tracks I listened to by that artist. This year, one of my longest streaks was The Comet is Coming, a psychedelic jazz-rock band from the UK.
Do biopics and musicals impact your listening habits?
Biopics and other musicals reignite our interest in artists. Just imagine my binges below scaled up to the millions of people who’ve seen these films!
Spotify Free Music App
Which artists can you rediscover?
I use the viz below to hunt around for long-forgotten music. Each dot is an artist, and each dot’s size shows me how many times I’ve listened to that artist. The x-axis shows the last time I listened to them. The y-axis shows the first time I listened to them.
Spotify Listening Time
More ways to visualize Data + Music
Spotify Listening Tracker
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post! Let me know what you think, and share what insights you find in your music history on Twitter using #DataPlusMusic. And don’t forget—you can follow me on Tableau Public for even more inspiration!
Spotify Listening Habits Apps For Beginners
Excited about music data but not wanting to visualize your own listening habits? Lucky for you, we’re celebrating Data + Music all summer long! There’s tons of great resources to inspire your next Tableau Public viz, including this guide to visualizing music industry trends with Spotify data.