This is How Most People Actually Listen to Music

Many people consider themselves to be music connoisseurs, experts at knowing what songs and artists are new and exciting, but also what’s classic, unheralded and occasionally unheard.

While that may be true for a small, highly-specialized group of folks, the truth is this — most people, at least the ones tuning in on streaming services, aren’t really all that engaged in this stuff.

For them, music is an add-on to their life, something they use, like a utility, to get from one place to the next. In that way, music is not necessarily their life — it’s just the soundtrack to it.

In a chat on the question-and-answer website Quora, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says that this was one of the most revealing things the company learned from analyzing user data.

“Our habits and moments are what define our listening more than anything else,” he says. “People want one kind of music when they’re getting ready to go out on the weekend, another for dinner at home, something else for working out, sleeping, and so on.”

Ek suggests that people tend to think they are very specific and pointed about what they want to hear — or, they’re completely nonspecific, and want to hear everything — but that regardless of any of this, what they wind up listening to is informed less by choice than what it is they’re doing while they’re listening.

In other words, we care less about what is playing once it’s actually playing.