Listening

How this is counted

A play counts at 30 seconds. That is Spotify's own bar for paying a rights holder, and it keeps skips and mis-taps out of the totals. It also means 30.8% of starts are excluded, which is a large enough share to report rather than quietly drop, and a moving enough one to chart.

Times are local, and that took work. The export stamps every play in UTC. Over these four years I listened from the United States, Japan, Italy, Canada and Singapore, so neither raw UTC nor one fixed offset is correct. Each play is converted using the country the export recorded. The one case that field cannot settle is the United States, which covers both Seattle and Honolulu, three hours apart, so the summer 2025 stretch in Honolulu is mapped separately. An hour-of-day chart built without this is quietly wrong.

Rankings need tiebreakers. Ordering by play count alone left tied rows in arbitrary order, so two runs over the same export produced different top tens. Every ranking now breaks ties on artist and title, and the output is identical run to run.

Podcasts and audiobooks are excluded. Across the whole export they come to 195 rows, next to 115,286 music starts, so this is a music history rather than a listening history.

Everything except Right now and Current rotation is computed from the raw export with DuckDB. Only the aggregates are published. The raw file stays on my machine, since it records where I was and what I was doing, minute by minute, for four years.