With the advent of the internet, we are living a huge portion of our lives online. As a result, our personal information is being tracked and recorded everywhere, all the time. If you subscribe to a music streaming service, this is especially true. Now, you might choose not to publish what you’re playing to your friends (private session for those guilty pleasures), but you are always providing this information to the streaming platform. That’s a crazy amount of data! It’s not only what you listen to, but how you listen to it. Do you find a new song and listen to it on repeat for three hours? Which songs do you skip over on shuffle, and which will you stop and rewind? Are you more likely to leave your playlist untouched, or do you obsessively curate the queue?
We can learn a lot about a person from this data, and can predict an astonishingly accurate picture of traits such as hobbies, lifestyle choices, buying habits and even personality. Admittedly, these analytics feel a little intrusive, but we can leverage this data to do some pretty cool things. Let’s take Spotify’s research initiative in what they call “Understanding People Through Music,” and their new platform Spotify for Brands. The concept is simple: analyze music listening habits to create stronger marketing towards customers.
When I ask people what kind of music they listen to, the most common response I get is, “a little of everything.” These days, it seems that tastes have become more diversified with the ability to pick and choose singles from our favorite artists. Speaking of artists, that’s another good point — if someone asked you who your “favorite singers” are, how would you answer? See, maybe I absolutely love a couple of songs by Halsey, but does that really make me a true fan? Is there any artist of which you know every song and every album? My point is this: merely asking a person about this information may not yield the most accurate results. But if we were to look instead at the data, the numbers don’t lie. Music intelligence can tell us how likely we are to listen to songs with a certain tempo, or how loyal you are to a given genre. The possibilities are endless.
To give us a taste for the intelligence in store, Spotify for Brands is offering a website, spotify.me, which allows users to see some of their listening trends and preferences. Just navigate to the site and allow it access to your Spotify profile. I discovered on my own spotify.me that my most played song ever is “Only Time” (2000) by Enya … because whenever I have a headache, listening to this helps me feel soothed ... yikes. I also learned that 61 percent of the time I’m listening to highly “danceable” music, and that I listen to an hour and a half every day.
So, how does your taste in music relate to your own personality? Check out your own trends and you might be surprised, or like me, realize you are much less cool than you thought!
