Spotify’s Year in Music 2015 is an eye-opening insight into how the world consumes music

Vaughn Highfield December 7, 2015

Spotify’s “Year in Music” is a wonderful gimmick from the music-streaming service that lets fans see the sort of music they’ve digested over the past 12 months. This year, however, Spotify has overhauled its usual dive into your musical tastes, giving you even more in-depth insights about your music-listening habits over the past year.

Spotify’s Year in Music 2015 is an eye-opening insight into how the world consumes music

To find out such personalised information you’ll need to log in to the website, but it’s really worth doing so. For instance, I found out that the first song I listened to this year on Spotify was YACHT’s “Shangri-La”, while my most listened to album of the year was Jordaan Mason & the Horse Museum’s Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head. Both of these facts took me by complete surprise.

I’ve also listened to a staggering 29,000 minutes of music from 1,430 different artists – which is apparently 27% more music and 497 more artists than I listened to in 2014.

And the service drills down even further, showing the songs you listened to each season, recommending a new set of tracks to take you into 2016, and letting you craft a custom playlist from your results.

spotify_global_genres

You can even chart the past year via music news, such as the controversy around Marvin Gaye’s lawsuit against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke for “Blurred Lines”. Spotify pulls a playlist from each news story to add to your collection. Although this is great, it’s the list of global music stats that really makes you realise just how much better a service it is over something like Apple Music.

Spotify gives you a wonderfully rich snapshot of the year of global music trends, comparing them to last year’s and charting the evolution of music. It’s a service with a purpose, not a service just trying to capitalise upon the popularity of music streaming.

Fun fact: in 2015 Spotify played more than 28.5 million tracks, an increase of three million over 2014. It looks as though the Swedish streaming service won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Apple music tried to dethrone Spotify, but find out how the two services actually compare.