I was hoping to look at my entire lifetime history of Spotify streaming, but I was only able to get a year of historical data in time for this project. I was prepared to annotate more of the lifetime listening in the context of my personal history, but instead I’ve looked at my listening trends for the past year and made an effort to identify from the data particular catalysts. It’s interested to do it this way, because the events from my life aren’t necessarily ones I would have even remembered except for having looked at my streaming history in this way.
The chart below shows all the artists (including podcasts) that I listened to for at least one hour over the past year (Oct 6, 2020, through October 3, 2021). Each tick mark represents one of the times I streamed the artist, the horizontal grey bars illustrating the time from the first through the last stream in that period.
This allows me to easily pick out, for example, the time I found a Dinah Washington vinyl album and must have gone back and streamed her more. I can also very easily see some of my long drives because there are relatively short pockets of podcasting during those times. All listening seems to pick up around the start of September (shaded in light blue), when I moved and I suppose was listening to music more as I unpacked.
I also figured I listened to music more on the weekends but wasn’t sure just how much more, since I also listen while working and throughout the day. Turns out Sunday (which includes Saturday night past midnight), sees my most Spotify streaming:
I was also hoping to write a JavaScript program to automate the looking up of basic information for all my top artists, but I couldn’t figure that out and so just ended up manually adding the gender of each artist I’d listened to for at least an hour over the yearlong period. To do that, I just looked up (if I didn’t know) whether one or more of the artists or podcasters in the group used or was widely described with he/him/his pronouns. Of the 56 artists I’d listened to for more than an hour, 24 used he/him/his pronouns:
While it’s a narrow majority of artists who don’t use he/him/his pronouns, the difference in time spent listening to he/him/his pronoun-users compared to others is much greater, though it did vary over time (you can see from the first chart I did have a Chopin/Satie period):
