The time has finally arrived! Spotify is ready to release its annual Spotify Wrapped; comprised of vibrant and stimulating backgrounds alongside new features such as personal messages from a user’s “favorite” artist (est. 2023), the Spotify Wrapped drop has surely become a day for many of Spotify’s 579 million users to look forward to. With the uniqueness that revolves around this personal online exhibition, what methods does Spotify use to collect each user’s data and how does this translate into a collection of slides and storytelling?
What is Spotify Wrapped?
The infamous Spotify Wrapped1 is an online visual gallery focused on providing individual insights into a user’s time spent on the Spotify platform. This presentation acts as a roundup of listening habits during the year, detailing each individual’s top artists, songs, genres.2 through colorful slideshows and story-like prompts.
How Does Spotify Track Its Data?
- Data Collection Timeline
Spotify begins its tracking period on January 1st and concludes on October 31st; this means that, despite the amount of times you may enjoy listening to your favorite classic holiday tune in December, the listening minutes for these songs will not be accounted for in your annual wrapped. 2
What Data does Spotify Track?
- Listening Data
Listening data represents a user’s total time spent listening to music or audio through the Spotify platform. Whether it’s through a podcast, a billboard-rated top album, or even offline listening where a user may only access their downloaded songs & audio, Spotify will develop a Wrapped for any user who has streamed at least 5 artists and 30 songs for at least 30 seconds. 3
Why Does Spotify Wrapped Work?
Categorizing the metrics of your listening habits isn’t exactly the most challenging part of developing your Spotify Wrapped. All it does is calculate your cumulated listening minutes and sorts your music into separate categories like “top genre”. For instance, if you listened to your favorite song 500 times for 1500 listening minutes, it may be likely that this artist or song will appear as a statistic on your Wrapped as either your top artist or top song. But if calculating these statistics isn’t the hardest part, then what is?
Spotify puts a large amount of effort into increasing user-engagement when a user first joins the app via assisted technology. Specifically, specially designed methods within Machine Learning Algorithms are used to hook users into the platform.
Spotify utilizes Machine Learning Algorithms in order to derive specific information to form conclusions about a user’s listening habits. Some of these algorithms include Collaborative Filtering, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Audio Analysis.4
Collaborative Filtering helps to identify patterns in a user’s listening habits in order to recommend similar songs or artists based on the user’s previous listening history. Natural Language Processing allows the back-end machine of Spotify’s program to translate the information that the user is feeding it, whether that be search query inputs or other relevant actions, into a language that the machine can understand. Lastly, Audio Analysis allows Spotify to analyze the type of audio that the user is engaging with. By doing this, Spotify is able to then classify each audio into a specific genre/category based on certain characteristics such as the style, tempo, etc. and recommend similar types of audios that the user may also engage with.
Combining Music & Technology
Music is an audible art, but pursuing a career in a music-focused establishment does not lend itself to just musician careers–this means you DON’T have to be the next Ariana Grande or be a part of the NYC Philharmonic Orchestra (although both are very impressive!). Rather, new technologies discovered each day are starting to create careers for more audio engineers, data analysts/scientists, and computer programmers in the music industry.
As seen by Spotify Wrapped, there are a multitude of ways in which the music industry is continuing to grow with the aid of uprising technologies. Machine Learning Algorithms are just one way in which technical skills are used to derive individual data from users all over the globe.5 With support from the creative and technical development of Spotify Wrapped, there are and hopefully more upcoming opportunities to get involved with both the music and technology industry.
Sources
- “2023 Wrapped on Spotify.” Spotify.com, 2023, www.spotify.com/us/wrapped/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023.
↩︎ - Antonio Pequeño IV. “Spotify Wrapped: Here’s How Spotify Calculates Your Listening Data.” Forbes, 30 Nov. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/11/29/spotify-wrapped-heres-how-spotify-calculates-your-listening-data/?sh=90c71131d3fc. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023. ↩︎
- How. “How Does Spotify Wrapped Work? – Lighthouse Labs.” Lighthouse Labs, 2023, www.lighthouselabs.ca/en/blog/how-does-spotify-wrapped-work#:~:text=To%20put%20it%20simply%2C%20Spotify,and%20wide%20on%20social%20media. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023. ↩︎
- Bhat, Harshini. “How Does Spotify Wrapped Work? (Explained with Examples).” AlmaBetter, 19 May 2023, www.almabetter.com/bytes/articles/how-does-spotify-wrapped-up-work. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023.
↩︎ - Rohit Shewale. “Spotify Stats 2023 — Subscribers, Revenue & Trends.” Demandsage.com, 15 Dec. 2023, www.demandsage.com/spotify-stats/#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20Spotify,and%20creators%20on%20its%20platform.&text=Spotify%20has%20574%20million%20monthly,of%20Spotify’s%20monthly%20active%20listeners. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023.
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