The following is a dive into my streaming history from the past year or so. For each track, I am given the time and date, artist name, track name, and for how long the track was played. The data was processed in Preparing the downloaded files.
Time spent listening to music
To begin, we can look at the distribution of the durations of the tracks. For reference, I have annotated the plot with 3 of my favorite songs: Stacy by Quinn XCII, Good Things Fall Apart by Illenium featuring Jon Bellion, and Choices by To Kill a King (you can listen to samples of these songs at the bottom of the page).
The durations range from 0 to around 10 minutes. Presumably, the short durations correspond to skipping a track at the beginning. For the purposes of further analysis, I will set the minimum length of a song as 60 seconds, removing data points with shorter durations. The longer songs were likely background noise tracks for various wilderness albums or coffee shop sounds.
We can also see how much time I spent listening to music by plotting the cumulative duration over time. By the gradual reduction on the slop over time, we can see that I reduced the amount of time I listened to music over the course of the year.
This trend is also supported by the number of tracks I listened to per day. The smoothened trend line indicates a lull in the fall of 2020.
The variability of my listening patterns also followed the same general trend. As the plot of the number of different artists and tracks per month below indicates, I had a peak of diversity in April and May of 2020 followed by a general decline.
Favorites
Next, I want to look into who my most played artists and songs have been. The next two plots show the top artists and individual songs from my streaming history, and the third plot shows the top songs from each of my favorite artists.
Interestingly, my top songs are dominated by Jon Bellion though my most played artist was Imagine Dragons. This likely indicates that I listened to many different songs from Imagine Dragons while I tended to listen to fewer Jon Bellion songs very frequently.
Plotting the number of times I listened to my top songs in each month, Good Things Fall Apart (orange) peaked in February, probably after I first discovered it in late January. Then, In April, I got hooked on Pre-Occupied by Jon Bellion (purple).
Below is a similar plot but showing how often I listened to my favorite artists each month.
Most artists followed the general trend of more listening early in the year, trailing off in the Fall. This was no true, however, for Quinn XCII (pronounced “Quinn 92”) because he dropped a new album, A Letter To My Younger Self, on July 10, 2020.
You can see this switch in the following plot of which Quinn XCII songs I listened to most. In July, there was a spike in the total number of Quinn XCII songs played, and the top individual song switched to Notice Me (yellow).
