2017 Wrapped - Spotify

Well, after the 2016 disaster that saw me cancel my spotify premium, this year I did receive a 2017 in review playlist and was able to click-through the little website that pulls the information.

Let's dig in, shall we?

In 2017, I listened for 21,201 minutes, to 3,346 different song and 1,475 different artists, along the way exploring 45 genres. For those keeping score at home, those 21 thousand minutes work out to about hours or just over 14 days. That's not bad, but even more so, consider that for about half the year I didn't even use Spotify after being really frustrated by losing the end of year review for 2016. I'm generally an active listener to - I put it on in the background while I'm working but I don't generally leave it playing if I'm not at my desk.

I'm not surprised about the variance in number of songs, that number is basically meaningless anyways, but I was surprised to see nearly 1,500 different artists. My only guess is that it is partially drawn from the way spotify sometimes considers it a different artist if there is a "feature" but I still think this is pretty mind-boggling. Although I guess you can subtract a couple for Richard D. James, Caustic Window, Aphex Twin, etc...

Top Artist

For some reason Spotify leaned in heavily with the "know yourself" theme this year and quizzed you on your listening habits. They presented a solid list but it was an easy pick for me, Lymbyc Systym was certainly a bright spot in my year and Split Stones was an album I put on repeat for a solid part of the year. This category is almost always guaranteed to be a new discovery - I am a huge fan of Mrs. Jynx and her body of work, but I generally don't spend a lot of time with songs I've heard before. I don't have the exact numbers but I doubt the others here were even close.

Top Song

Ah, this category always is enjoyable for me. The top artists and albums are always pretty predictable, but you never know what song you'll get stuck on for a three day period that will show up on this list. I actually had to think really hard about this one, because I had no idea if it was TYSM or Taylor Swift... Ultimately, though, I think Honeymoon Phase might actually be a 2016 song, so this year it was ...Ready For It? (abysmal punctuation aside). I mean, its a good song, and Taylor Swift is a good performer. It still is funny though - you don't see much of Taylor Swift or top 40 elsewhere in my lists.

Top Genre

I used to think genre really mattered, then I decided it was a waste of time, now I'm somewhere in the middle. Having said that, looking at these vague words, the answer should be obvious. Scorecore? Neo Mellow? Deep Chiptune? Compositional Ambient? These remind me of the Xbox Live Gamertag generators from a couple years ago that just did "AdjectiveNoun" to make you a screenname.

Results

I was pretty confident in getting these right, but I was pretty surprised with the variance between my top 5 artists, songs, and genres. For Artists, Lymbyc Systym and Tycho do something very similar, and Little People is certainly directly adjacent. Its Taylor Swift and TYSM that stand out a bit, especially so because in each of their cases, it was really just one single song that I put on repeat (a lot). I was also kind of surprised that Kiiara didn't make that list, since Gold was one of my top songs.

The top genres, on the other hand, are probably reflective of my general listening tastes. I probably spend most of my time with IDM, but some songs that I think are IDM are categorized as Electronic instead, and I have no idea what the difference between those and EDM is. Trip Hop is my standout here - a genre I had almost no experience with and did some exploratory listening to through reddit.

The Age Thing

Spotify knows my age, so I assume that is where they pull this from, but I just had a nice laugh at seeing "Brostep" with an average listener age of 25 at one end of the spectrum and "Folk Rock" with an age of 40 at the other end.

Skips

187 skips this year, only defined as "less than the average listener." I've done some informal polling and amongst my friends with premium accounts, this is several orders of magnitude less (most of them are in the range of 2-4 thousand).

 Overall

I'm... ok with this new format. On the one hand, it works, and that is a massive improvement over previous years. On the other hand, the data is just ok. It doesn't really tell me much about my listening habits that a "most played" list wouldn't. The red, green, and pink color scheme is also tough to get behind.