Introduction to Research

Ever wondered what it’d look like to do your own Spotify Wrapped? Look no further than this post! This personal data story analyzes my listening trends from October 2024, to November 2025. I wanted to see what trends I could uncover with my listening that wasn’t from a Wrapped. Some questions I wanted to answer was which artists were in my top 10, What time during the day I listen to music the most, and what days of the week did I listen on the most? Something that I can get out of this is potentially changing my music habits, like what artists I listen to, or maybe even changing the times that I listen to music.

Dataset and Variables

I got my data through a request from Spotify. It came in a bunch of Jsons and I used python to extract the table that I wanted which housed my listening data for music (I don’t listen to podcasts so I didn’t extract that). The main meat and potatoes of the data set comes with 4 columns for us to work with. These columns being endTime,(which only tells you when the song ended), artistName, trackName, msPlayed (How long you listened to the song). Through this though, I was able to make a few of my own custom variables. One of them categorized songs that I listened to for more than 60 seconds which I used to give a rough idea of which songs I skipped and didn’t skip. The other variable I made simply was used so that I could showcase my song listening trends by the hour of the day.

Visualizations

To start off, I was curious which Artists I listened to the most, and honestly, Seeing Tory Lanez, Lil Nas X and Daniel Caesar as my top 3 wasn’t as surprising, although, I did expect Lil Nas X to be on top, but this may be recency bias, as I’ve listened to him quite frequently over the last few months and his recent album was my 2nd most listened album.

This list surprised me. I didn’t expect for 2 songs that released a few months ago to be my number one songs, but this made sense as Daniel Caesar was my #2 listened to artist for my Spotify Wrapped.

There are 3 giant spikes for this chart, one in December 2024 which is around when Pharrell Williams release his Auto-Biography movie made using Legos by Piece by Piece, and his sound track was to die for, and the other 2 in April and June 2025 was me preparing to go concerts so I was listening to those artists’ discography!

I seem to be a night owl with my music! My peak hours were from 7pm-11pm (19-23) During this time I’m either studying or to myself so I listen to music as a relaxation method.

This chart may seem simple, but it was one of the few custom variables I made. For this, I made a categorical variable that separated songs that I spent more than 60 seconds listened to and created a Skipped before a minute and didn’t skip before a minute. Out of all my songs, I didn’t skip 13,200, and skipped about 6900 songs

Conclusion

All in all, it seems like my trends of Spotify listening data was pretty specific. It turns out that I mainly listen to music during the evening/night. Additionally I uncovered that I tend to heavily prepare for concerts by listening to a lot of music from that artist before seeing them so that I’m able to sing the lyrics to my hearts content. It also seems that compared to my previous spotify wraps, my top artists are the same with some minor deviances towards the end of my top 10. Some changes that I’d like to make is listening to music more during the day, and trying to diversify my catalog with something other than Tory Lanez, Daniel Caesar and Lil Nas X.