A year of my Spotify

One of the easiest dashboards I have made. Particularly since the data need not be cleaned so you can just reuse the template. Scroll down for instructions. 19,000 streamed songs in a year.

This is thanks to EU’s GDPR which mandates that consumers should have access to the company’s data about them. And even though I use Spotify in a non EU country, the fact that they are headquartered in Sweden (in EU) and they rely on a cloud provider that would have global resources means that I am eligible for GDPR’s rights too.

Caveat: Spotify even logs the songs that you skip over (so they have 0sec play time). Hence the record count can be slightly misleading. For context, I have 750 records with secPlayed=0, 5,000 records for <3sec 7,000 records for <15sec out of a total of 19,000 records.

To make this for yourself, just follow the instructions from here. I have added a lot more visualisations in my dashboard, so you might want to copy my report instead. You’ll just have to add a secPlayed field (=msPlayed/1000) in manage added data sources.

This project leads to two other thoughts:

1. Spotify provides some amazing information of songs (happiness, dance-ability, tempo, album cover etc) through APIs. Connecting to those APIs can lead to more interesting and even interactive apps.
2. I should explore more of my GDPR-enabled-data to see what can be inferred. Starting with Google?