Data just for fun
This post is a little different than most. The other day when I was driving and listening to my music playlist, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to analyze a bit of data about it. Nothing deep or technical here; just a bit of fun. A heads up going into this: this is my playlist I like to listen to on a daily basis, so it's not at all a collection of every song I think is significant.
Exporting my playlist from Spotify turned out to be quite a bit trickier than I expected since Spotify doesn't play nicely with others. Eventually, I got the basic info you typically see in a playlist plus a few other bonus bits. To keep this short, we'll only look at a few graphs.
Let's look at # of tracks per artist first.
The first thing to note is that the horizontal axis doesn't show all the artists. For example, it looks like there are only four or five artists with more than two songs in the playlist, but there's probably a couple dozen artists for each one listed on the graph.
Still, we can see that a vast majority of artists in my playlist only have one or two songs in my list. Only 41 out of 931 artists have more than five songs on my playlist. What does this mean about my musical tastes? I don't know. I just add stuff when I like it.
Next, look at tracks per release year.
Obviously, 2018 and 2019 were big years for me. I think that's because I was closely following a few sources of music I had found at that time and was collecting quite a bit from them. I also think it's interesting that up until those years, the number of songs per release year is quite consistent! That is, once I discovered music existed in 1997. I was a bit of a slow starter. Conclusion: on average, I think there's about fifteen songs released each year that I want to listen to on the regular.
Length of tracks is next.
I think this is what I expected. I don't have any classical or much other music that tends to be longer. Almost everything is in the three to five minute range.
There you have it. A small glimpse into my daily listening. If you want to take a closer look at my playlist of Spotify, here you go!
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