My personal data can also be mapped against what the 50 million other Spotify users are playing, sharing and adding to playlists. There is more to a taste profile than that, though: my data is then mapped against wider “cultural knowledge” about how those artists are described online, and the characteristics of their music – The Echo Nest famously analyses songs using criteria including acousticness, organicness, tempo and even “danceability”. “We start by trying to understand the songs you’ve been playing and how many times you’ve been playing them, then roll that up into the artist data too, to get a basic grounding of your tastes,” says Kalia, running me through the data.
Love is Only Affection - The Dig-Its (45 plays).When a Fire Starts to Burn - Disclosure (46 plays).It’s Alright, It’s OK - Primal Scream (48 plays).Pale Green Ghosts - John Grant (48 plays).Kandaka Moore & Nikki Cislyn - Clean Bandit (50 plays) Like a Sundae - Black Moth Super Rainbow (51 plays).Waking Dream - Bleeding Rainbow (54 plays).Confess To Me - Disclosure - Disclosure (57 plays).The Throw (Extended Version) - Jagwar Ma (65 plays).Forever - Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Remix (80 plays).Hurray for the Riff Raff (373 plays, 48 songs).The base for anyone’s taste profile then comes from the songs and artists that they’ve listened to most. Spotify’s product owner of taste profiles, Ajay Kalia, explains that my taste profile is based on music I listened to between 1 January 2013 and 19 December 2014 – Spotify has data before that period, but the taste profile algorithm hasn’t ingested it yet.ĭuring that period, I listened to 7,328 individual songs by 2,140 artists on Spotify for 22,780 total “plays” – tracks listened to for at least 30 seconds. Photograph: Scott Campbell/Redferns via Getty Images The basic data However, drilling down to one individual is a useful step towards understanding how the algorithms developed by Spotify and any digital entertainment service worth its salt are making sense of our habits, in order to serve us better.ĭisclosure: chart-toppers. A quick caveat: nobody should care about my individual tastes other than myself: this isn’t a look-how-cool-I-am show-off article. So, does it understand me? I asked the company, which agreed to compile a report of my “taste profile” and talk me through it.
In 2014, it bought a music technology company called The Echo Nest to help it make sense of all this data, and understand its listeners better. Spotify has my big music data, just like it does for all 50 million of its active users. I’ve been using the streaming music service since it launched in 2008, and since about 2011 it’s been my main music player – including for songs and albums that I’ve bought from other sources like iTunes and Bandcamp during that time. But here’s an alternative question: what kind of music does Spotify think I like? It should know, after all. Whenever I’m asked, I tend to end up mumbling a mish-mash of genres and artists. “So, what kind of music do you like?” It’s one of the hardest questions to answer in a social situation, especially as you get older and your tastes diversify.