The way we consume music has changed almost tenfold compared to how we consumed it 10 years ago. Streaming services dominate the music industry and give consumers a whole new way to listen to their music. No longer do you have to buy CDs or listen to your songs on the radio. Spotify and other streaming services have made it so simple: just search a song, artist, or album, and listen to it. What you probably didn't know is that every time you do that, Spotify collects all of that data and dumps it into what they call Spotify Insights.
Spotify Insights is a collection of different types of data that it collects from its services. Data such as: number of plays a song gets, how many times an artist is shared on social media, if certain songs get skipped more than others and so much more. The data is translated into blog posts, graphics, podcasts, and other medias to help people better understand it.
One of the more interesting parts of the website is the Audiographic map. This is a map, updated weekly, that shows the different types of music being listened to all around the world. You can see things like emerging music, popular music, viral music and distinctive music in basically whichever area of the world you're interested in. So how does it work? According to Eliot Van Buskirk (2016), "Spotify Data Alchemist Glenn McDonald analyzes many billions of listener-track interactions on a regular basis to distill each place's musical character into those distinctive playlists."
Spotify Insights is just another example of how we can use big data to learn more about people. Analyzing this data from Spotify can help us learn what types of music people are listening to and how they are interacting with it. But what if we looked at it in comparison to worldwide events? We could compare how people are listening to certain music during the Olympics or Presidential elections or after tragedies. Next week on DIGIA, we'll delve deeper in how Spotify did exactly this for its "2017 Wrapped" campaign.
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