Sunday, November 24

Spotify’s Year in Review Reveals Interesting, Musical Trends

Spotify has taken a page right out of Facebook’s playbook. The music streaming service has set up a new site — spotify-yearinmusic.com — that not only lets users check out what was big in music in 2014 according to Spotify user activity, but also lets individual users see what artists, songs, and genres they listened to the most.Generally speaking, music fans shouldn’t be all that surprised by Spotify’s findings. In 2014, Spotify’s some 50 million active users streamed more than seven billion hours of music — nearly 800,000 years’ worth. The top male artist was Ed Sheeran, who also had the most listened-to album of the year on Spotify. The top female artist was Katy Perry, and the top group was Coldplay. “Happy” by Pharell Williams was the most listened to song of 2014.

Things get more interesting when individual months and days are examined, though. For example, users ushered in 2014 with Abba on New Year’s Eve, and on New Year’s Day, users listened to Hangover playlists. Interestingly, this type of playlist was listened to on New Year’s Day more than any other single day in 2014. A week later, on January 7, people got on top of their New Year’s resolutions to lose more weight, with workout playlist activity spiking higher than any other time of the year.

The findings also reveal cultural trends. People tend to listen to exercise playlists between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., which may mean that that’s when most Spotify users hit the gym. In early May — when students need to start focusing on exams — instrumental, classic, and orchestral tunes became the thing to listen to. On weekends, “Shots” by Lil Jon gets played without fail.

Many Spotify users may be most curious about their own data and habits, however. Based on an entire year’s worth of listening, Spotify figures out what music each user is most into. It lists the top five genres the user likes, as well as the top artist, top album, and top song. Additionally, it also lists the top 10 tracks listened to, and the seasonal favorites of the user.

Best of all, Spotify will even create a custom playlist for the user composed of songs they’d never listened to based on their listening trends. Though it’s obviously a clever marketing campaign, you have to hand it to Spotify. What better way to keep users interested than to offer them a highly customized, finely tuned list of new songs based exclusively on the things the user already clearly likes?

“It is always good to custom tailor your products and services for specific customer interests,” says Kelly Cooper, Marketing for Agency 850. “We give a thumbs up to Spotify for strategic customer engagement, this will generate repeat loyal customers.”

To check out how and what you’ve been listening to on Spotify, head to the site and log in with your Spotify account. Once you’ve looked over your own trends, have Spotify generate your playlist. You’ll be glad you did.

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