Who’s Listening to Spotify: An Analysis of Listeners by Country
By David Jansen, Via Romano, and Laura Schroeder
Do you use Spotify when you’re walking to class, doing homework, or listening to music with your friends? You’re not alone. As of late 2020, Spotify has 345 million subscribers, 44% of whom listen to Spotify on a daily basis (Iqubal, 2021). But who exactly is listening to Spotify? This is the main idea we explored in our analysis of this data as we examined how general Spotify consumption habits differ across countries and how the specific content consumed differs. One of the clearest conclusions we drew was that the US is by far the largest consumer of Spotify in terms of the number of songs it streams. This could be either because of Spotify’s popularity here or because the population of the US is simply so large. Also, some songs were featured on multiple countries’ top song lists, but with varying degrees of popularity. Later in this article, we will explore this idea with the example of “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo. The data we used for this analysis comes from Spotify Charts, Spotify’s method of aggregating the most listened to songs either in a country or globally. This particular dataset has compiled the top 200 songs for nine different countries — the USA, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Egypt, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Poland. The data comes from the week of 3/4/2021–3/11/2021, and the countries included were selected at random.
When we started analyzing the data as a group, we noticed that when we did a value sort to see the top songs in each country, the USA’s top song seemed to have a lot more plays than the top song in any other country. We then did a value sort by streams and confirmed that the USA listens to a large percentage of the most streamed songs on Spotify, meaning that the USA is doing the vast majority of the streaming. From that value sort, we generated the following two charts:
These two charts both show the most streamed songs on Spotify that week, and both have the number of streams as the variable on the Y-axis. The scale for streams goes from one to eight and is in millions of plays. The graph on the left has track names on the X-axis to name the most streamed songs, and the other graph has country on the X-axis to show where the song was listened to. Out of these top 20 songs with the most streams, as seen in the second graph, the USA is by far the country that does the most streaming. You have to go down seven bars on the second graph to find a country that is not the USA, and the USA takes up 16 of the 20 total spots. For “drivers license” the most popular streamed song that week, Mexico and the USA were its two biggest listeners, and its number of plays in the USA was 4.79 times the number in Mexico. The USA also listened to “drivers license” 360.11 times more than Morocco — its smallest listener — did. Even Morocco’s most popular song, “Mghayer” by ElGrandeToto — found when we did a filter to see Morocco’s top 20 songs — only has 200,828 streams to 8,464,069 for “drivers license”.
There are several potential directions for future work after the data analysis that we’ve completed. One that stood out to us was that, although each song was labeled by the country whose top 200 songs list it was on, there was no indicator of the country of origin of each of the artists. It would be interesting to see whether certain countries were more interested in listening to music by artists from their own country, or if they were more likely to listen to foreign artists. Further, we could also then see which countries’ music was most listened to in other countries. One might assume that American music is most listened to worldwide, but it would be interesting which other countries’ music has a wide global reach, as well. Further, adding a genre descriptor could also provide insight into how people’s listening habits vary from country to country. We also noticed that genre is a category missing from the data. It would probably be challenging to categorize songs that don’t have a clear genre. Moreover, some songs can fit into multiple genre categories, so overcounting is possible. Also, genres can tend to be looked at from a Western perspective, so it might oversimplify genres of songs from non-Western countries. However, it still might be very interesting to see where specific music genres are popular around the world.
Some other questions the data raised for us were: Are some of the streams on Spotify from bots? For example, Youtube users pay for views, and Instagram users can pay for followers, so is it possible that some artists pay for streams? How can we be sure that the stream numbers are reliable? Are there countries where Spotify is not available, and there are other streaming services used instead? Are there places where Spotify is blocked? What about artists that do not have a Spotify profile or have their own streaming services or partnerships (i.e., Beyonce and Tidal), and how does this make Spotify’s data less accurate? What counts as a play — the whole track? A minute? A few seconds? Does population play a role in what country has the most streams? America is the country that streams Spotify the most, but Spotify is a Swedish company, and Sweden is not one of the top users of Spotify, so this might be due to population. We think the answers to these questions would give a more complete picture of Spotify usage.
