Year In Review: Spotify Edition
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First post of 2021, so…happy new year! In the spirit of the new year and resolutions and all that jazz, I wanted to kick things off with a post about data. One of my goals for the year is to build out my public portfolio because everything I’ve created for work is private and cannot be shared externally. So with the pandemic and friends losing jobs, I got to thinking…. if I lose my job right now, I don’t really have anything that shows what I can do. I mean I can update my resume but there’s no tangible proof that I actually know what the fuck I’m doing professionally. I guess the first red flag here is that worst-case-scenario mentality but that’s what it’s like in the mind of someone who is an over-thinker with pretty bad anxiety! Anyway, after that grand realization, I decided to build out my public portfolio. What does something like that look like, you might ask. Or maybe you’re wondering what it is that I even do for work. Or, more than likely, you’re just my good friend reading this blog to support me — ty, I appreciate you.
So what do I do? My job title? Data Analyst. What does that mean? It’s so vague, right? Well, I analyze data. I’m not trying to be a smart ass, but that really is what I do. I take data sets, big or small, and import them into this software application called Tableau, which I then use to churn out visualizations that “tell the story” of the data. I have a computer science degree from good ole Chicago State University — I KNOW! Chicago is not a state but it might as well be because Chicago is superior to the rest of the state of Illinois. I said what I said. I picked my major by googling the highest-paying majors and picked CS from a list. YOLO, am I right? I always wanted to design apps for iPhones and growing up I was pretty tech savvy-ish so it wasn’t completely random. Well, this major/career path while being a D1 athlete traveling every weekend fucking sucked. I started to really hate some of the classes and I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to it to become really good at it.
I think it’s funny that we’re supposed to know what we want to do with our lives. When we’re growing up, people always asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. After graduating from college in 2016, I still had no fucking clue what I wanted to do. I was always a super visual person and loved colors and advertisements and over the past few years, I’ve really developed an admiration for marketing.
Ugh, I’m rambling. So long story short, I was able to find a way to kind of combine things I learned in school with color and storytelling, to become a visual analytics analyst. I take ugly rows and rows of data and turn them into something that is visually appealing and digestible.
Well, what does this have anything to do with Spotify, Marnie? I’ll tell you. First, I set my goal to develop this public portfolio using this public server called Tableau Public. Anybody who is anybody in the Tableau world has a profile here, so honestly, I was late getting there. Better late than never, though! I requested data from Spotify as well as literally every other service/app/product that I use. Spoiler alert, all of the apps on your phone collect fucktons of data about you. If you want to get really creeped out, check out Instagram’s new terms and conditions.
After requesting my data, I waited a few days until I could download it and then I couldn’t sleep until I built something with it. I knew I wanted to keep the colors the same as the iconic Spotify interface so that viewers would automatically draw the connection. Here is what I came up with:
The top part is simple and honestly, the whole thing is pretty self-explanatory. Those big numbers on the top are known as BANs, which stands for Big Ass Numbers. I’m not even lying. I chose to put the aggregate totals at the top that show basically the summary of all the data. The next two sections go deeper into the data as your vision flows from top to bottom (most common approach). Top artists, songs and podcasts are just simply showing exactly that plus the amount of time streamed/played. But the bottom section, “top artists by month” is really where I would want my users to spend the most time.
No surprise that Bad Bunny is my top artist across the majority of the months, but him being in the top spot or two doesn’t really tell me much. If I stop here and just display the rank of each artist, it would be a very, very basic and surface-level analysis. I don’t know that I would call it much of an analysis. I wanted to be able to dig deeper and understand how much time I was truly spending streaming each artists and how that compared across the different months.
When I hover Bad Bunny’s name, I see the trend for the year and notice three major spikes. One around Feb/March, one May/June, and another around Nov/Dec. Why though? He’s obviously my favorite artist but that doesn’t really explain the spikes, right? What if I told you that Bad Bunny released three albums in 2020? By looking at the trend, can you tell which one was my favorite?
I know, I know! I definitely have an obsession with Bad Bunny. Let’s take a look at another artist then, shall we? Here’s Billie Eilish. Totally different genre than the previous artist so it’s a bit strange that she would be ranked so high no? Maybe. But why was she at the top just that month? What happened in April? Oh April, remember those days? When we thought we’d only be in quarantine until the end of April? Tragic. Like most people, I had to find a way to keep working out, especially because I refused to leave my apartment for 61 days. So, I bought a Peloton. What the hell does Peloton have to do with this Spotify review? Data is so beautiful and powerful. Peloton has these classes that are called Artist Series where they pick an artist and create a class to go along with the music of that artist. Guess which artist series class I discovered on April 1, 2020?
Alright, third and final artist, The XX. The XX vibe is much more similar to that of Billie Eilish. I can’t remember if it was last year or the year before that my friends and I went to a music festival at Randall’s Island, NY, where we saw them perform. I have no words for that show. They were absolutely spectacular and that day was exactly that summer is supposed to feel like. The XX is also one of Steph’s favorites and we always listen to their songs when we’re together.
So when I look at the dashboard, I notice that they're in the #2 slot for the months of June, July & August. Then, I try to think about the things that I was doing that could be driving that spike. June 20th is Steph’s birthday and we were in the Hamptons blasting The XX every chance we could. On the beach, on the boat, in the Jeep. Then, after the Hamptons, we took a 14-hour road trip from NYC to Louisville, Ky. Lot’s of their songs were played during this long drive. Then in July, we were in Utah with two of our other friends where we also blasted The XX songs and danced around to the beat. Lastly, in August, Steph and I spent a lot of time at the West Side Tennis Club’s pool with Diamond Dan himself.
I could go on for days talking about this stuff, but I won’t. In part, because I’m sleepy but also because I don’t want to bore you. I don’t think that people realize how much information we can get from data apart from what the data is recording itself. There are so many links between different things that seem totally distant, yet are so closely related based on the data. Though this was a silly little use case, this type of analysis and visualization can be implemented with all kinds of data and I think that’s the beauty of it. As the year progresses, I’m going to be implementing more and more tracking to analyze my behaviors and moods and using data and technology to reach my wellness goals. What are your new year’s resolutions? Whatever they are, remember to not be so hard on yourself. Remember that your resolutions are there to help you and push you to reach the goals that you set for yourself. Happy new year, friends.
xx hangrymarn
