Spotify’s Bad Data Visualization Practices
You’ve likely seen the Spotify Wrapped yearly review. What you may not have noticed are the rule-breaking data visualizations. Let’s go through a few of them.
Number 1:
Here we see 2-dimensional data (genre and minutes listened) on 3-dimensional bars. The extra dimension creates noise.
Number 2:
Each year an inch represents a different amount of minutes. Look at years 2015 and 2019. If we laid these lines side-by-side, you would instantly think that we listened to more music in 2015 than we did in 2019. In reality we listened to roughly half.
Number 3:
This one is strange. It clearly represents that December is an outlier month. But how exactly is a stream represented? Is it Mariah Carey’s height? Her 2-D surface area? Unclear. I struggle to see how November’s Mariah Carey is ~8X the size of October’s.
Conclusion:
Reserve visualizations for when you have large data. If there are fewer than 8–10 points, just use a table. I applaud Spotify for creating a fun, viral end of year marketing campaign.
