How diverse is my Spotify?

Spotify Wrapped is everyone’s favourite Christmas present. You get to see your own horrible taste, or silently judge everyone else’s. I look forward to it every year, but it never quite satisfies me. I want to know more. A single year of music tells you nothing about how your taste develops, and nothing beyond your favourite song of the year.

Part of that hunger was already stilled a few years ago, when I downloaded stats.fm (still called Spotistats back then). It’s one of the few apps I’ve ever paid for, with all the Google rewards I’d gathered over the years. It let me look past last year’s stats, at my favourite artist (Future), most played album (Chopin’s Nocturnes) and my top song of all time (Time Moves Slow by BADBADNOTGOOD). You can already see these on my music page, along with what I’ve been listening to recently.

But I wanted more. I had a feeling my taste had evolved over the years and become more diverse, and my all-time top songs and artists didn’t tell me anything about that. They’re a static blob: anything new has a lot of catching up to do before it breaks into a top 10. So here is my “deep dive” into the last decade of my listening history, starting in 2015.

Fighting the algorithm

Fresh out of high school, ready to start studying, I used Spotify completely differently than I do now. I made a playlist for every genre, mood or niche I was into, and listened either to full albums or to those playlists. Nowadays I feel like I’ve let “the algorithm” take the wheel: I lean much more on dynamic playlists and song radios. Albums are still my favourite, though. You can crawl into an artist’s head much more easily and see (or hear) their ideas more clearly. That said, the first album I ever saved was Flockaveli by Waka Flocka Flame, so I’m not sure that was the vision.

Unfortunately, that means my handcrafted-playlist era is invisible here. I can still see the algorithm taking over, although it’s closer to lane assist than to fully self-driving. Full albums still dominate, but within playlists the curating has been outsourced to the computer. When I don’t know what to listen to in the morning, my daylist or one of the daily mixes is the go-to.

Radios alone beat every playlist with a name in it. The one exception is the first playlist I ever made: Tunes. Back in the day it was basically my likes, and it was all hip-hop (Drake, Future, Ronnie Flex, Travis Scott). It’s still the most played named playlist.

Matching my listening history back against what’s in Tunes makes this much clearer. It used to be almost all I listened to; now it’s more of a trip down memory lane with the occasional revisit. I started using likes around 2022, and ever since then they’ve been my main way of listening to more diverse music. But most of what I play now isn’t on any of my lists at all. About a third is full albums (up from 6% in 2015), and the rest is mostly those Spotify radios and mixes.

Genre dominance

Seeing Tunes still that high up after 2024 made me want to see how my genres have shifted over the years. I’d guess (or basically know) that hip-hop is still a big part of what I listen to, but I feel like I’ve spread out across a lot more genres.

Looks like my gut feeling was right: from over 60% at the start of my history to only a quarter now. A lot of that gap has been filled by indie, which I listened to much more before I joined Spotify (my CD collection is almost entirely indie and rock). I’m not quite sure what caused the change, but it isn’t just nostalgia. Newer artists (Men I Trust, The Strokes) sit side by side with older ones (Vampire Weekend, Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party).

The patriarchy

Looking at my indie artists, I was surprised not to see many women pop up. I know I don’t listen to many women in hip-hop (Little Simz is probably the only exception?), but I expected at least some of my girlies to show up. So how patriarchal is my listening history?

It’s almost embarrassing: in the first years, not even a tenth of my plays had a woman in them. Looking back that’s not too surprising, given what I was listening to, but seeing the numbers was still a bit of a shock. I’m glad I turned it around, mostly thanks to Faye Webster, Clairo, Kali Uchis, Mitski and Jorja Smith. We can defeat the patriarchy one song at a time, guys!

My faves

My all-time favourite artists don’t follow the same trend, though. In the overall ranking, the first woman (not counting the pianist on the Chopin album at #19) is Crumb’s lead singer at #38, then Faye Webster at #41. The top itself is no surprise, partly because I know I’ve listened to (and still listen to) these artists a lot, and partly because this is the exact stat I got stats.fm for.

What I couldn’t see was how long these artists stayed with me through the years. I know Future keeps popping up in Wrapped every year, but lots of artists seem to come and go. How many actually reappear, and who simply fades away, never to be listened to again?

These are all 66 artists that ever made one of my yearly top 10s, in the order they first got there. The grey is how much I played them each month; terracotta marks the years they were in my top 10.

Almost all of them are still around: 60 of the 66 got played in the last year. These six didn’t: Bryson Tiller, A Day To Remember, Shlohmo, Burial, Pop Smoke and Mild High Club. Three of them were 2020 favourites.

Most artists have one big year and then fade into the background. Only 19 made it back into a top 10 at least once more.

These are the ones that keep popping up. Some after years away: Spinvis was a favourite in 2017 and then again in 2025, Kendrick Lamar in 2017 and then again in 2022 and 2024.

Summed up per year, with a dot for every top 10 year. Future and Bring Me The Horizon made it eight times, Drake six. Newer regulars: Tyler, The Creator and Yeat.

Only a handful of artists stay in my top 10 year after year. Some come and go, while the household names stay remarkably constant. Diversity and consistency at the same time: a nice balance.

Where am I

I’ve been listening to more Dutch music recently, and wanted to know if my geography is spreading out too. How many countries have my ears visited, and which areas are still undiscovered?

End of 2015: 11 countries. 60% of it American, with Dutch hip-hop (Ronnie Flex) and a Canadian (Drake) as runners-up.

By 2017, 30 countries. Sage marks the ones that are new since the last step.

2018 to 2020 is when it really opened up: 64 countries. The UK took over from the Netherlands as number two (Arctic Monkeys, Mount Kimbie, Bring Me The Horizon).

Now: 85 countries all together. Most of Central Asia and a big part of Africa are still grey.

Not too surprising to see the US so high up on the list, although I was not expecting it to drop in the last 2 years. The Dutch return did happen, but later than I thought: Dutch music hovered around 3 to 5% of my plays from 2020 to 2024, and is back at 15% this year (Sef, Lil Kleine, Ronnie Flex), about where it was when I started.

Many other countries are making a surprise appearance, but apparently I’ve listened to some Mongolian (Bodikhuu), Angolan (Puto Prata) and Bolivian (Jaime Laredo) bangers.

I love data

My biggest conclusion from this whole undertaking is a simple one: I love data. Being able to really look into my own listening behaviour like this is just fascinating, especially since I have almost a decade of it. Let’s see how things shift in the following decade, if Spotify is still around by then <3

Technical report

• Data: stats.fm (plays), MusicBrainz (gender, groups, countries), Spotify (genres, playlists, pictures) and Exportify (playlist exports)
• Code: Python, Observable Plot and Astro
• Coding agent: Claude Opus 5.5 (in Claude Code), which also wrote this technical report